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THE 



PROGRESS OF THE AGE, 



AND TIIE 



DAGGER OF THE AGE 



TWO LECTURES 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE ST. XAVIER CONFERENCE OF 

THE ST. VINCENT DE PAUL BROTHERHOOD IN 

THE HALL OF ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY. 



KEY. LOUIS HEY L EN, S.J. 



CINCINNATI: 
JOHN P. WALSH, 170 SYCAMORE STREET. 

1865. 



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Control Number 



1111 

tmp96 026795 



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PREFACE 



The present literary compositions form part of a 
course of lectures delivered during the winter of 
1862-63, by some of the Professors of the St. Louis 
University. The publication of these two lectures has 
been thought particularly appropriate at this time, 
both on account of the interesting nature of the subject 
and the ability with which it is treated, and as a slight 
tribute to the memory of the author, since deceased. 

The Rev. Louis Heylen, was born at Iieyst-op- 
den-berg, near Antwerp, Belgium, in the year 1828. 
He performed his first studies in the college of 
Mechlin, where he was distinguished for brilliant 
talents, and that solid piety which characterized his 
after-life. The account of his entry into the religious 
state, and of his labors in this country, we extract 
from a brief notice published in the Freeman's 
Journal, shortly after his death. "Animated with 
the desire of consecrating himself to God in the reli- 
gious state, he decided upon joining the American 



4 Preface. 

mission, with which he had become acquainted through 
the writings of the venerable Father De Smet. Ac- 
cordingly, at the close of his studies, crowned with the 
honors of his class, he renounced every prospect of 
eminence and emolument which his great abilities 
seemed to promise him, and entered the Jesuit Novi- 
tiate of Tronchiennes, Belgium. After a few months 
spent in that holy solitude, he was instructed to cross 
to the United States, along with several other young 
men devoted to the Missionary vocation, and arrived 
at St. Louis in 1848. At the close of his probation, he 
was admitted to the religious vows, and, having 
finished his philosophical studies with applause, was 
employed for several years in Cincinnati and else- 
where, in the various duties of a college. He was then 
sent to St. John's, Pordham, to go through his course 
of Theology, where he fully sustained his reputation 
for ability. On his return to the West, he passed a 
brilliant examination in the whole of Philosophy and 
Theology, and was promoted to the priesthood in 1859. 
Prom that day to his death, he was employed in many 
useful offices — chiefly as Professor of Philosophy in St. 
Xavier College, Cincinnati, where he formed a number 



Preface. 5 

of pupils, who will long remember his services to them. 
He was likewise assiduous in the confessional and pul- 
pit. His style of oratory was earnest and vivacious, 
and distinguished for originality and abundance. 
Those who were best acquainted with his intellectual 
habits, regarded Father Heylen as a man of genius, 
remarkable for the facility with which he inastered the 
most profound subjects, and the clearness with which 
he imparted his information to others. He had, more- 
over, thoroughly studied the English language, and 
was intimately conversant with its literature. The 
last year of his life was spent at the St. Louis Univer- 
sity, where he filled the chair of Poetry, with great 
credit to himself and advantage to his pupils. He 
was engaged in preparing them for their annual ex- 
amination, when he was arrested in his labor by a 
violent malady which carried him off, after five days 
of suffering." His death occurred about four months 
after the delivery of these lectures ; and it is to be 
hoped that, besides the good which they are otherwise 
calculated to effect, they will long serve as a means of 
keeping fresh in the minds of all who knew him, an 
affectionate remembrance of the talented author. 



THE AGE OF PROGRESS. 



Society, like individuals, is, in all ages, distin- 
guished by some predominant, or, at least, widely 
prevalent spirit; some idea, the theme of every tongue; 
some master passion, deeply agitating the nations; 
some all-absorbing or favorite impulse, governing the 
energies of the civilized world. It varies at differ- 
ent epochs, as it varies in different individuals, and 
constitutes the peculiar character of an age. It is the 
main source of the ever shifting current of events. It 
forms, according as it is a spirit of good or a spirit of 
evil, the principle of the world's greatness or degrada- 
tion, the main cause of the rise and fall of empires. 
It explains, as far as it is given to man to understand 
them, the dealings of Providence with the human 
race. It lies at the foundation of the philosophy of 
history. It is so essential to a correct understanding 
of our age, that I deem it necessary to illustrate it by 
casting a rapid glance at the great epochs of history. 



8 The Age of Progress. 

The earliest ages, distinguished for a while by a 
mighty struggle between the virtues of the race of 
Seth, and the vices of the children of Cain, become 
gradually marked by a universal corruption, which is 
swept away by the flood. After the deluge, there 
arises a period of universal pride, drawing down on 
earth another universal punishment, of which human 
language bears the indelible traces through all time. 
The rise of states and the foundation of empires is 
another well-marked epoch, succeeded by the rise, 
spread, and almost universal dominion of idolatr} r . 
Then follow dreams of world-wide conquest, and world- 
wide empire. Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, w r ear the 
tiara of empire ; each in turn, rewarded with earthly 
dominion for earthly virtue, decays at last under its 
own vices, and sinks, in its fall, under the burthen of 
woe denounced by the voice of prophecy. When the 
last of ancient empires, having passed the zenith of its 
glory, is declining under the load of its corruption, 
Christianity introduces a new epoch, marked by a new 
struggle between good and evil. The w r orld, redeemed 
by the blood of God, is regenerated by the blood of 
twelve millions of martyrs. At the close of the first 



The Age of Progress. 9 

epoch of Christianity, there is, beyond the boundaries of 
Eoman civilization, a vast upheaving of barbaric na- 
tions, the barbarian awaking from his long slumber in 
the world, and rushing upon the empires of civilization 
to accomplish the will of God. It is the age of barba- 
rian invasion. Scourges in the hands of God to chastise, 
and rend in pieces, corrupt, idolatrous, persecuting 
Rome — the Goth, the Hun, the Vandal issue from their 
trackless forests in the North of Europe. Armies of 
Mongols pour down from their mountain fastnesses in 
the far east of Asia. From the desert of Arabia the 
prophet of Mecca sends forth his hordes with scimitar 
and torch to subdue the finest, but most corrupt 
regions of Asia, Africa, Europe, to the sensual religion 
of the Koran. The epoch of barbarian invasion intro- 
duces a period strongly characterized by the conflict of 
new and old ideas and manners, of Roman and bar- 
baric legislation, of the strong passions of the forest, 
and the efnminate polish of an effete civilization. Out 
of this vast chaos, gradually moulded into harmony 
by the action of religion, arises the brilliant empire of 
Charlemagne. Its dismemberment leads to feudalism, 
that mixed period of great vices, and splendid virtues, 



10 The Age of Progress. 

which, for four or five centuries, shaped the laws, 
manners, and ideas of European society. Feudalism 
gives birth to chivalry. It is the age of the Crusader, 
— the glorious age of Christian chivalry. Eouscd by a 
generous enthusiasm, the new nations of Europe gird 
on the heroic sword of the Crusader, in the holy cause 
of the rights of man, and the rights of heaven. Placing 
the cross upon their mailed armor, forgetting their an- 
cient feuds, Frank, Lombard, Saxon, Gorman, wave on 
wave, throng to glorious battle. Side by side, like 
brothers, the legions of the cross rush against the pol- 
luted and polluting legions of the crescent. All 
Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, resounds 
with the war cry, new in history, of " God wills it," , 
"God wills it," The latter portion of the Middle 
Ages, now thoroughly civilized by the persevering ac- 
tion of the church, lays the foundation of our Modern 
Progress. It is a brilliant period of art. Christian 
architecture builds the lofty aisle and soaring pinnacle 
of the Gothic Cathedral; Christian painting adorns the 
majestic pile with masterpieces of spotless purity, and 
awe-inspiring grandeur. The Middle Ages close with 
an epoch of peaceful, but mighty revolutions. It is an 



The Age of Progress. 11 

age of artistic and literary revolution: an age of dis- 
covery and invention. The art of painting, the dis- 
covery of a new world, the revival of letters, change 
the current of all events, and remodel the whole of the 
future history of man. Upon the threshold of modern 
history, corruption, grown up amid the splendor of dis- 
covery and the classic beauty of arts and letters, causes 
the universal cry of Reform, characteristic of the six- 
teenth century. It is an epoch of .Religious revolutions. 
Nations, forgetting to reform their own corrupt man- 
ners, attempt to change what the Eternal had founded 
to last unchangeably through all time. Then follow 
for long years, the combined scourges of war and 
tyranny, two of the heaviest scourges which the 
Almighty in His wrath can send to chastise the world. 
The spirit of liberty, the characteristic spirit of the 
eighteenth century, protests against the absolutism 
sprung out of the Reformation. It is an age of politi- 
tical Revolutions. The spirit of liberty, thrilling the 
nations from Europe to America, founds on our own 
shores the glorious republic of George Washington. 
In Europe, perverted by the evil genius of infidelity, 
it ends in the dark days of the French Revolution. It 



12 The Age or Peogress. 

calls up from its own bosom the scourge of its excesses 
Its children are led to useless slaughter, in myriads on 
myriads, by the mighty but tyrannic genius of Bona- 
parte. 

Opening amid the storms of revolutionary battles, 
offspring of an age of revolutions which have changed 
the whole aspect of civilized society, itself the parent 
of new revolutions in art, science, commerce, industry, 
our age opens a new era in the history of the w^orld. 
Its characteristic spirit sums up the characteristics of 
all ages. Its motto is Universal Progress. More 
widely, more deeply swayed by a common impulse 
than any period which has preceded it, claiming as its 
own, every name expressive of Progress, proudly 
boasting itself an age of freedom and independence, an 
age of light, — attempting at times to carry its ruling 
spirit of Progress to the very heart and the very 
altars of God; our age, according as truth or error, 
virtue or vice inspires its prevailing spirit, must rise 
to unequalled glory, or descend to unequalled shame, 
merit heaven's blessings in overflowing measure, or 
deserve vials filled with darkest vengeance. This con- 
sequence is evident from all history ; it would be easy 



The Age of Progress. 13 

to demonstrate it from the very nature of things; it is 
strikingly illustrated by the history of single indivi- 
duals, endowed with extraordinary powers, and bend- 
ing all their energies to effect their objects. 

Such men, angels in human form, or incarnate 
spirits of evil, are the towering figures of history, the 
saviours or destroyers of the world. They are con- 
querors like Cyrus and Alexander; scourges like Atilhi 
and Ghengis Khan; patriots like Washington ; they are 
legislators like Solon and Lycurgus ; they are discov- 
erers like Columbus ; they found philosophic schools 
like Plato and Aristotle; they are apostles like St. 
Paul and St. Francis Xavier ; founders of religious 
orders like St. Dominic and St. Benedict; or dark 
religious innovators like Mahomet and Luther; or 
fierce enemies of religion and morals like Voltaire and 
Rousseau. Indeed, in any sphere, the power of single 
men is often wide as the world, boundless as truth or 
error, enduring like time. Such men alter the bound- 
aries of empire and 'the destinies of nations. They 
change realms into deserts, or deserts into blooming 
fields. They create armies of widows and orphans, or 
make all generations debtors to their burning charity 



14 The Age of Progress. 

and holy zeal. They stem the current of error, or ex- 
tend it like a flood. They transform the votaries of 
Venus into martyrs, or the sons of martyrs into slaves 
of sensuality. They mould the character of their own 
time, leave their impress on all history, and for weal 
or woe, for time and eternity, influence the lot of 
countless millions of their fellow beings. 

These facts form a startling illustration of what 
may be expected when the whole civilized world, with 
all its varied energies, moves under the impulse of a 
common spirit ; when it employs its millions of mighty 
arms, tasks all its treasures of genius, wealth, power, 
to accomplish a single work. This, to an extent un- 
precedented in history, our age has done, and is doing. 
Conscious of its unsurpassed resources, proud of its 
triumphs in art and science, it has attempted with un- 
exampled determination, to eclipse all by-gone ages. 
It moves, like a disciplined army, under one banner, 
the banner of universal progress. Here, too, lies its 
danger. There is alike ground for fear and hope. The 
inheritor of all that is great and glorious, of all that is 
ignoble and degraded in the past, it bears in its bosom 
the germ of all human greatness, the principles of all 



The Age of Progress. 15 

human degradation. It may adopt the disorganizing 
doctrines bequeathed to it. It may choose to follow 
the eternal light of truth, which forms the strength and 
safety of nations and of the world. It may improve on 
the vices which have ruined ancient societies. It may 
emulate the virtues of the most heroic times. It may 
fall from ruin to ruin, or rise from glory to glory. It 
may end in unparalleled disasters ; it may close in 
peerless grandeur. 

Hence the various opinions which men have formed 
of this Age of Progress, its tendencies, its history, its 
destinies. What has it effected ? Whither is it hast- 
ening? Some, looking only at the bright side of 
things, are disposed to rank it higher than the greatest 
in the past, and to predict for it a future of ever in- 
creasing greatness. Theirs is the poet's motto : 

*' Time's noblest offspring is the last." 

Others, turning to the dark side of the picture, re- 
gard it as one of the worst of ages, and think they see 
the future looming up from our own vices like a low- 
ering tempest : the future to them appears pregnant 
with calamity. 



16 The Age of Progress. 

Time will not allow ine this evening to discuss the 
whole question here presented. I shall limit myself in 
this lecture to a historical sketch of the age, reserving for 
the next a more detailed examination of its danger. An 
impartial review of what the age has accomplished, will 
enable us to judge how far it is really entitled to the 
name of Age of Progress ; while the study of its dangers, 
may, perhaps, enable us to foresee how far we may expect 
a repetition of the ruin denounced against all nations who 
forget their God. The two lectures form parts of but one 
whole, which, I hope, will justify, in some degree, the long 
preliminary remarks in which I have indulged. 

In attempting to delineate this Age of Progress, as it 
is, I must necessarily confine myself to a few prominent 
facts, a mere outline, the details of which fill our modern 
libraries, are daily multiplied by what passes around us, 
and recorded as they occur in the ten thousand works, in 
all languages, yearly issuing from our prolific press. 

The history of the Age, from the stand point of pro- 
gress, may be reviewed in three different lights, corres- 
ponding to the three kinds of progress which it is 
possible for man to make, viz. : Intellectual Progress, 
Material Progress, Moral Progress. 



The Age of Progress. 17 

In regard to Intellectual Progress, our age is chiefly 
marked by its advance in the natural sciences, and their 
application to the purposes of industry and commerce. 
In the domain of the natural sciences, it is clearly 
entitled to be called the Age of Progress. It stands at 
the head of Ages. It has perfected what former times 
only began. Out of the accumulated materials gathered 
by past labors it has erected a multitude of new sciences, 
while its own resources are preparing materials for still 
newer sciences. It is scarcely more than half a century 
since Chemistry, Mineralogy, Botany, Geology, and 
numerous other branches of natural history, became 
sciences really worthy the name. Many of the properties 
and law r s of matter, it is true, were known in the most 
remote ages. The Alchymist, among the Arabians and 
Christians, in his anxious search of centuries after the 
elixir of life, and the mysterious stone whose touch was 
to transmute base metals into silver and gold, had brought 
up from the dark depths of nature a large number of im- 
portant chemical secrets. The vast animal remains in the 
rocky strata which form the mountain side or protrude 
above the plain ; the huge bones dug out from the field, 
or raised from the marsh, had, for upwards of two 



18 The Age of Progress. 

thousand years, given rise to geological speculations, to 
cosinological systems, sometimes extravagant, sometimes 
making surprising approximations to the truth. Solomon, 
the Scripture informs us, " treated about trees from the 
cedar that is in Libanus, unto the hyssop that cometh out 
of the wall."* The sciences which may have been con- 
tained in the lost works of the wisest of men, were again 
investigated, at later periods, by such men as Aristotle, 
Theophrastus, Pliny ; and in the last century were par- 
tially revived by the labors of Linnaeus, Buffon, Lace- 
pede, and others. But with the exception of Physics 
and Astronomy, scarcely one of all the branches of the 
natural sciences, had been placed on a scientific basis, at 
the opening of this century. 

At the dawn of this century, amid the shock of politi- 
cal convulsions, amid the wreck of thrones and old poli- 
tical fabrics, science was silently working a revolution far 
mightier and far more enduring than any revolution 
wrought by the conspirators of '89, or by the brilliant 
sword of Bonaparte ; a revolution which changed for all 
time the commerce, the industry, the social intercourse, 
the wants, the ideas, the manners of nations. In their 
* Kings iv., 33. 



The Age of Progress. 19 

religious bearings, the sciences of our age have vindicated 
the wisdom of that God whom infidel revolutionists in the 
last century imagined they had deposed from his Eternal 
throne. They have justified the records of that divine 
revelation which the cynical patriarchs of infidelity had 
cast away with triumphant scorn. I can do little more 
than allude to what has been accomplished. 

The earliest of the new sciences, Chemistry, founded, 
as a science, at the close of the last century, by the genius 
of Lavoisier,* has since obtained its most brilliant suc- 
cess. The cabalistic formulas, and mystic nomenclature 
of the alchymist, his cheerless groping in the dark, rarely 
catching a few glimpses of light, and ending after a life- 
time of labor in gloomy disappointment, are permanently 
replaced by scientific terminology, clear arrangement of 
facts, invariable laws, sure processes, clearly calculated 
results, intelligent foresight advancing with firm step to 
the discovery of new secrets. The brilliant experiments 
of modern chemistry, its power over the combinations of 
matter, its masterly analysis, its manifold applications to 
medicine, Agriculture, industry ; the invention of Da- 
gucrre, that beautiful, though familiar gift of chemistry, 

* Lavoisier died 1704 on the scaffold. 



20 The Age of r e o g r e s s . 

causing a ray of light to draw a portrait with a minute- 
ness of perfection which no human hand can hope to 
equal ; photography, delineating upon a piece of glass no 
larger than a pin's head, a landscape, a group of figures, 
a poem, which to the naked eye looks a mere black speck, 
but appears complete under the glass, with every trait 
and line sharply defined and exquisitely finished ; or, in 
its recent application to astronomy, settling questions 
which had long divided the minds of the learned ; all 
this, which has become so common that we have ceased 
to admire it, would have appeared a chimera, had it been 
predicted a hundred years ago ; all this forms in reality 
one of the most striking triumphs which the human mind 
has obtained over the secrets of nature, even in this age 
of scientific triumphs. In a religious point of view, 
chemistry, proving that all compound substances in nature 
are combined according to invariable weight and measure, 
beautifully illustrates the text of wisdom, " Thou hast 
ordered all things in weights, and number, and measure." 
The grand discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, re- 
vealed the laws which rule the heavens ; chemistry 
descending to the depths of the elements, counting and 
weighing the atoms, has revealed in the obscurest paths of 



The Age of Progress. 21 

nature an order, an economy, no less wonderful than the 
order and the harmony of the stars and planets; it has re- 
vealed in the crystal the same design as in the blazing 
orb ; it has laid open another portion of that Sovereign 
wisdom and power, which holds atoms bound to atoms, 
as it holds world to world enchained in their mighty 
course through the bright immensity of the universe. 
This indeed is one of the noblest offerings made by 
science on the altar of revealed religion. Geology, 
Zoology, Botany, and other kindred sciences sprang up 
together about the beginning of this century ; they have 
progressed together, each throwing light upon the other, 
while each advanced in its own sphere. 

In 1800, Cuvier * announced to the scientific world a 
new science relating to fossil remains, in which he dis- 
played a genius equal to the greatest that adorn the 
annals of the natural sciences. He relied in his researches 
on the constancy of the laws which God has established 
in the animal as in the mineral kingdom ; on the un- 
changeable relation of the organs, their unvarying adapta- 
tion, each to each, and to the climate, food, habits of each 
species in the animal creation. Aided by his unrivalled 

• In his first memoir on fossil Elephants. Cuvier, born in 1765, died in 1832. 



22 The A a e or Progress. 

knowledge of comparative anatomy he was able, from the 
structure of a single bone, dug up by chance from the 
sea beach or the field, and regarded by the ignorant as a 
portion of the skeleton of some extinct race of giants, 
to describe the whole structure of an animal, though 
every living individual of the species had long since van- 
ished from the earth. He could describe its form, its size, 
its habits, its food, its haunts. His descriptions were so ex- 
act, that in many instances, they were verified by the sub- 
sequent discovery of entire skeletons. From the evi- 
dences of design which nature now exhibits, he succeeded 
in inferring what it was, in those obscure epochs, when 
the Mastodon and Deinotherium, the Ammonite and 
Nummulite sullenly walked the chaotic earth, or swarmed 
in the widely heaving waters of the primeval seas. 

Ehrensberger,* a Prussian naturalist, examined the 
minuter forms. By the aid of the microscope he dis- 
covered that the animalcule, — infusoria, as they are 
called, — of which as many as 500,000,000 may exist in a 
single drop of water, are not, as had been until then sup- 
posed, mere living specks of inorganized matter, but 
beings endowed with perfect organization. He found 

* Born 1795. 



The Age of Progress. 23 

that like the higher animals, they possess organs of sight, 
muscles, nerves, teeth, or at least, as subsequent researches 
have fully established, an organic structure, as wonderful 
as that of the huge elephant which swallows them by mil- 
lions of millions in the running brook. These animalculse, 
as diversified in their forms and habits, as bird, fish, or 
beast, furnish still another illustration of that infinite 
Power which shapes with equal ease the vast form of the 
Mastodon and perfect organisms more minute than the 
mote which sparkles in the sunbeam. 

The same Prussian naturalist discovered that these mi- 
nute forms of life have left, all over the earth, remains 
incomparably more extensive than those left by the 
higher species of extinct animals. His researches show 
that the soil which supports the forest, the quarry out 
of which palaces are built, are in many instances, but 
vast cemeteries, all made up of the microscopic remains of 
infusoria. The shields or skeletons of these animalculao, 
consisting of solid silica or flint, of lime, of iron ore,* 
and often constituting nearly the whole of immense beds 
of rock, and vast fields of clay many feet in thickness, are 
of such extreme minuteness, that it takes from 30 to 

* Oxide of iron. 



24 TheAge of Progress. 

40,000 millions of them to make up a single cubic inch. 
It has lately been found that the process which deposited 
these microscopic forms of life is still going on beneath 
the ocean. A few years ago,* the American expedition 
which sounded the Telegraphic Plateau, brought up from 
the bottom of the Atlantic, what appeared to the naked 
eye a mere mass of soft loam, but when subjected to the 
glass by the late Prof. Bailey, of West Point, proved to 
be a collection of shells, of exquisite mould. This dis- 
covery revealed the fact, that the waters of the ocean, 
like the waters of our brooks and rivers, swarm with 
microscopic life. The minute remains, gradually, softly 
sinking, like flakes of snow, have lined the whole surface 
of the ocean-bed with a downy covering of extinct life, 
and aie renewing in its dark caves the first steps in the 
process which created the rock beneath our feet. 

The ultimate purposes for which God has so profusely 
scattered these minute forms of life, in the clear, cold 
depths of stream and ocean, where the unaided eye dis- 
covers no trace of their existence, have not been explained. 
They are as little known as the last reason, why he has 
studded the heavens with suns, which, to unassisted 

* See Maury. 



The A a e of Progress. 25 

vision look like mere sparks. However the researches of 
Zoology, and similar researches in Botany, have disclosed 
a portion of the mystery. They have revealed a new 
evidence of design, where formerly the plan of creation 
seemed less complete. They have made it clear that, in 
the animal and vegetable worlds, there exists, link on 
link, a complete chain of beings, from the microscopic 
mosses and algae to the gigantic palm tree ; from the al- 
most imperceptible minuteness of organization in the in- 
fusoria, to the exuberant muscular organism of the mam- 
moth ; just as faith reveals, in the world of intelligences, 
another chain of beings, extending from man through all 
the bright hierarchies of heaven, up to the highest seraph 
that burns before the throne of God. 

The discoveries of Botany, Geology, Chemistry, and 
other kindred sciences, have likewise enabled Geology to 
base its theories on truly scientific principles. Geology, 
as a science, belongs entirely to this century. Its object 
is the history of the mineral masses of the globe and their 
organic remains. It counts and measures the rocky strata 
which form the outer crust of the earth. It investigates 
the forces which have lifted the enormous mountain chain, 
and filled with metallic deposits the fissures opened by 



26 The Age of Progress. 

the earthquake. In the interior of the rock, it studies 
the foot-prints, made when the unwieldy creatures de- 
scribed by Cuvier formed the earth's inhabitants. In the 
rock, on the mountain side, it interrogates the wave-lines, 
made by the tide, which rippled to the breeze, or rolled 
in the tempest, ere our present continents were heaved 
out of the ocean. It asks how many ages were required 
to prepare the coal- mine and the quarry and the rich soils 
above them ; how many ages each family of extinct beings 
must have existed, when the remains of the little num- 
mulite have sufficed to build pyramids; at what period in 
the changes of our globe, the Himalayas and the Andes 
were upheaved by the central forces of the earth, and gol- 
den sands were deposited at the foot of the snowy moun- 
tains, and in every El Dorado from the Ural to the plains 
of Australia. Many of these obscure problems, Geology 
fails to answer ; many of its theories are still unsettled ; 
but it has proved that, unless we wish to assert causeless 
miracles, we are forced by the obvious appearances of 
nature, to admit, before the creation of Adam, not literally 
six days, but periods whose enormous duration can only 
be counted by myriads of centuries. 

In opening these magnificeut views of preadamitic 



The Age of Progress. 27 

periods receding in the dimness of the past beyond the 
present possibility of calculation, geology has rendered 
an important service to revealed religion. It has pre- 
sented upon the book of Genesis, a commentary as splendid 
as it was unexpected. As far back as the fifth century 
of our era, St. Augustine had pointed out, that it was 
scarcely possible to take the first verses of Genesis in their 
literal meaning ; for, he observed, the first Mosaic days 
could not have been days like ours, since there was neither 
sun nor moon to measure their duration. God, indeed, 
might have created the world in an instant, with all its 
appearances of remote antiquity ; but the Scripture 
represents God as proceeding gradually; the spirit of 
God as moving over the dark waters of the primeval 
chaos; as bringing out, one by one, from its confused and 
jarring elements, each of the varied harmonies of earth 
and heaven, until the whole harmonious magnificence of 
the universe was completed, and the Eternal rested from 
all the works which his hand had made. In attempting 
to interpret what is so briefly and so mysteriously intimated 
in Holy Writ, Geology has adopted various theories, too 
numerous for present discussion. But whether the days 
stand for periods, or the mysterious Bereshith, " In the 



28 The Age of Progress. 

beginning," is meant to express indefinite duration, the 
general view presented by geology is in the highest degree 
worthy of God's eternal wisdom, and completely accordant 
with his eternal love for man. He whose counsels are 
coeval with his being ; before whose boundless duration 
all time is but a passing day ; before whose uncreated 
light all worlds are but a faint fleeting shadow, and man 
a mere speck in his infinitude, might well allow long ages 
to prepare man's dwelling. For man, though so lowly, 
he had loved even from eternity, as the masterpiece of his 
own hands. Though scarce worthy, he had destined him 
to live in beatific vision with his own eternal Being. 

While Geology and other branches of natural history 
have received a scientific form, the other sciences have 
been advancing to perfection. 

To cite but one instance, Astronomy. Though its 
cultivation began some three or four thousand years ago, 
under the clear Chaldean skies, though it was long since 
raised to the condition of an exact science by the genius 
of Kepler and Newton, it has yet obtained in this century 
some of its most brilliant successes. The great work of 
Laplace, La Mecanique Celeste,* in which he traces out 

* 1799-1825. 



The Age of Progress. 29 

the law of universal gravitation in all its complicated 
influences, would alone suffice to render our age forever 
illustrious in the annals of Intellectual Progress. In 
1801, while the first portion of this splendid work was 
going through the press, the accidental discovery of a 
small planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, led 
to the discovery of a large series of asteroids,* the list 
of which is still steadily increasing. In close proximity to 
each other, these miniature planets have suggested the 
idea that they are only the shattered fragments of a large 
'planetary world, and may ultimately furnish the means of 
demonstrating that, in remote epochs, those silent worlds 
blazing nightly over our heads, the image of unchangeable 
order, were subject to convulsions even more violent than 
those which have left their vast traces in our own globe. 
But the great triumph of our age, indeed, of any age, is 
the discovery of the planet Neptune. In 1781, Sir Wm, 
Herschel had discovered Uranus by accident. In 1846, 
Le Yernier in France and Adams in England, relying on 
the constancy of the laws of the heavens for their sole 
guide, discovered, by mere arithmetical calculation, the 
spot where an additional planet was required by the solar 

* 1801-1807; 1845. 



30 The Age of Progress. 

system. The powerful telescope of Dr. Gaile of Berlin, 
was turned to that spot, and near it blazed the mighty 
planet, an everlasting monument to the genius of scientific 
progress. This achievement, extraordinary as it is, 
scarcely surpasses Eessel's measurement of the distance 
of the fixed stars from the sun; a problem which had long 
baffled all the efforts of Astronomy, and, indeed, had 
been thought incapable of solution. This was in 
1838. Science has begun to sound the farthest depths 
of the heavens, as it is endeavoring to penetrate the 
obscure depths of preadamitic ages. Bessel's measure- 
ments show that it takes light, moving at the rate of 
12,000,000 miles a minute, or 192,000 in a second, 45 
years to reach our eyes from the polar star. To reach 
one of the nearest of the fixed stars (61 Cygni,) it would 
take a rail-car traveling night and day, at the rate of 20 
miles an hour, 324,000,000 of years. In 1803, Sir Wm. 
Herschel's discovery of Binary Stars, that is, of systems 
composed of two stars, each revolving around the other 
in regular orbits, furnishes good grounds for the convic- 
tion that the entire universe is made up of systems of 
suns, many of them incomparably brighter than our 
own .* Each of these Solar worlds appears to move with 

* Dr. Wolla&ton. 



The Age of Progress. 31 

its train of planets around a common centre, probably 
Alcvone * the central star in the Pleiades. It has been 
calculated that our own world, our great sun,f with all its 
glorious planetary orbits, with all its circling comets, is 
carried forward, in its motion around the Great Central 
Sun of the universe, towards some point in the constella- 
tion IIercules, '| at the rate of 154,000,000 of miles a 
year. 

These efTorts, made to ascertain the laws of the 
heavens, are equalled by the efforts made of late years 
to ascertain the laws which govern climates, the fixed 
laws which rule the ever changing influence of heat, 
light, electricity, magnetism, on land, on sea, in the 
atmosphere. From these endeavors, an entirely new 
science is springing up, known under the general name 
of meteorology ; it is an attempt to map the course of the 
winds and clouds across the sky, to track the hurricane 
in its devastating path, to mark the undulating line of 
climates around the globe, to fix the subtile laws 
followed b} 7 the fluctuating and changeful directions of 
the magnetic and electric currents. This scientific 
undertaking, the most unpromising perhaps ever 

* Maedler. f 1783-1805-1806. 

Sir Wra. Hersehel. J In a line joining the two stars n <£ u Herculis. (Vide 

the Prussian Astronomer Struve.) 



32 The Age of Progress. 

entered upon by man, has already produced such works 
as Maury's celebrated Geography of the Sea; it has in 
part mapped the winds, it has shortened the mariner's 
path across the trackless ocean, traced the laws by 
which the currents of the ocean are made to carry 
the warmth of the tropics to the north-western shores 
of Europe and America. 

These proofs of scientific progress might be inde- 
finitely multiplied, by instances drawn from other 
sciences, such as Hydrodynamics, Optics, and other 
branches of Physics ; or from Ethnology, Philology 
and the recent researches in Archeology, Geography, 
History ; all of which, time compels me to pass by in 
silence. It would require volumes to enumerate every 
invention, every improvement, in every species of 
scientific progress, made in the last fifty years. I can 
only allude, in passing, to those glorious historical 
researches, which, as in the case of Hurler's life of In- 
nocent III, have vindicated the names of great Pontiffs, 
defamed by ages of calumny. 

Could we dwell on the Une arts, we should find 
sculptors, painters, architects, such as would have done 
honor to the age of Leo X ; in literature, poets whom 



Tite Age or Progress. 33 

the age of Pericles would have been proud to own ; 
orators, whose voice, like that of Demosthenes could 
rouse nations, and make tyrants tremble. Indeed, our 
age has produced a man who, as an orator, stands 
alone, and whose name is justly enshrined in the hearts 
of a people as glorious for their constancy, as their 
persecutors are infamous for three centuries of cruelty. 
Demosthenes could terrify Philip, he could not prevent 
the subjugation of Greece; O'Connell, at the head of a 
down -trodden people, made England quail, and relax 
for a moment her tyrannic grasp. The annals of polit- 
ical eloquence, either in our own or any other age, offer 
no example of a triumph like that gained by the 
eloquence of Daniel O'Connell when he wrenched from 
the blood-stained hand of England the first reluctant 
instalment of long-deferred justice, which unbound 
one chain from the neck of the down-trodden, — 
the act of Catholic Emancipation. His name, by the 
memories it awakens, by the holy cause of which it is 
the symbol, by the great triumph it commemorates, 
forms an epoch in the story of Ireland's wrongs, an 
epoch in Christian history, another glory for the Isle 
of Saints, an immortal honor to the human race. 



34 The Age of Progress. 

But though eloquence, poetry, art have produced 
great geniuses, still it must be owned that, on the whole, 
as an artistic and literary age, our century can not rank 
with the ages of Pericles, Augustus, or Leo X. The 
claim of our age to be regarded as an age of Intellectual 
Progress, lies mainly in its progress in the natural sci- 
ences. In this respect, indeed, it stands at the head of 
all ages. 

With the characteristic spirit of the age, with its im- 
mense activity, its boldness, its originality, its indomitable 
perseverance, drawing forth energy from reverses, it is 
impossible to assign limits to the progress which may be 
made even before this century closes. From the Cape of 
Good Hope to St. Petersburg, from Washington to Mad- 
ras, from a hundred observatories, the sleepless watch- 
towers of science, the astronomer nightly turns his powerful 
glass tothe blue deep of the heavens, and seeks to penetrate 
still farther the mysteries infolded in their azure depths. 
On land, in the city, in the country, out on the desert 
plain, the meteorologist notes each fitful change of the 
elements. On sea, under every sky, a thousand mariners 
lend their aid to the advancement of the new science, and 
record each breath of wind that fills their sails, each cur- 



The Age of Progress. 35 

rent that alters their course, each passing cloud that ob- 
scures the sun. To extend the field of the natural sciences, 
there are men who brave the deadly cold of the Polar 
night, and the deadly heat of the African sun. Under 
the grasp of powerful minds in every country, each dis- 
covery is made to supply new means of investigation, each 
new science made a power capable of disclosing new se- 
crets. Far as man may reach, there are always farther 
depths in nature. While one enigma is solved, glimpses 
are caught of darker riddles. The profound sciences of 
nature's laws are offered by the Almighty as perpetual 
food to the unceasing activity of the human mind. Though 
the laws and properties of matter are limited, man cannot 
reach their last limit. The created can never master the 
last secret of the Creator. 

The obvious inference is, that the natural sciences, are, 
in their very essence, progressive. The spirit of Scientific 
Progress, if it continue for a hundred years, may produce 
an epoch to which our times shall appear like an age of 
Science in its infancy, — like the gray dawn to the full 
blaze of noonday. 

Still our age will always be known as an age of great 
scientific progress. What it has done, will ever entitle it 



36 The Age of Progress. 

to the grateful remembrance of posterity. Even Revealed 
Religion, as I have remarked, has cause to thank it. I 
know that a modern reviewer of great name,* in speaking 
of the connection of science with natural religion remarks 
that "the discoveries of modern Astronomers and Anato- 
mists have really added nothing to the force of that argu- 
ment which a reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird, 
insect, fish, leaf, flower and shell." True, they have ad- 
ded nothing to the substantial strength and logical com- 
pleteness of the argument, but they have added to its au- 
thentic completeness and moral beauty. Each new dis- 
covery of Science is a trophy, with which Religion loves 
to adorn her altars. To the rudest minds, it is true, the 
universe breathes and speaks of God. To the rudest of 
ages, heaven and earth were eloquent instructors. Ere one 
natural science was founded, ere one law of the stars was 
known, the ever returning, ever fresh fertility of spring, 
the teeming earth exhaling fragrance from fruit and flower, 
— the burnished insect buzzing in the sunbeam, — the 
huge beast filling the forest with his yell, — the loud 
voice of thunder, — the sublimity of the wide ocean, — the 
tempest raging on the deep, — the mimic murmur of the 

* Macaulay, in Ranke's Hist, of the Popes 3G, Eclin. Rev., Oct,, 1840. 



The Age of Progress. 37 

glossy spiral shells on the sea-beach, — the unfading beauty 
of the heavens and the many twinkling golden stars, — the 
sun daily running his unerring career, — all nature, with 
its mysterious laws of inert matter and organized exis- 
tence, — life, motion, feeling, mysteriously separated or 
mysteriously combined, — the universe, ever sublime in the 
immensity of its proportions, ever exquisitely beautiful 
in the perfection of its minutest parts, — all this, in all 
time, was all-sufficient to impress man with awe for the 
power, with love for the beneficence of the Great Creator. 
Upon all its ample vaults, and all its splendid decorations, 
the universe ever bears the stamp of infinite wisdom, and 
infinite power. But still, modern science, investigating and 
revealing many of the hidden laws of matter ; explaining 
the origin of the tempest and the voice of the storm ; dis- 
covering a world of organized life in a drop of crystal 
water, — generations of extinct life in the forest and the 
quarry; interrogating the mountain-side, and learning the 
secret history of the ages of the Creation ; attempting to 
measure the depths of the heavens, and discovering there 
the existence of millions of blazing worlds, scattered 
through all space beyond the possible discoveries of man — 
universe within universe, all moving in concentric union 



38 The Age of Progress. 

around a common sun; modern science, in all the vastncss 
of the mysteries it has disclosed surely presents, far more 
eloquent views of God's glory, than the universe of itself 
would suggest. It gives rise to more awe-inspiring ideas 
of God's omnipotence; opens deeper abysses in his wis- 
dom; endows the heavens with a new voice of praise. It 
allows us still to view this boundless world with its bound- 
less history, as our own home. We may still view it as 
being merely a beautiful image of the boundless love of 
God for us — for you — for me, who though thus lost in our 
vast home, like mere motes unseen in the sunbeam — a no- 
thing in the immeasurable expanse of God's creation — are 
yet, small as we are, the masterpieces of God's own hand, 
the grand object of the most loving care of our Great 
Creator. 

These reflections are obvious, but they are not the ordi- 
nary view which the age takes of our Intellectual Pro- 
gress. Our age may boast its broad systems of education, 
its universal diffusion of intelligence; but it has no pecu- 
liar title to be called a religious age, or an age of faith. 
Its ruling spirit is rather the spirit of material progress. 
To this our great Intellectual Progress is made subordi- 
nate and subservient. What our age demands of the na- 



The Age of Progress. 30 

tural sciences is to increase its wealth, to open new gold 
mines, to create new highways for commerce, to improve 
machinery, to invent new comforts, to create new luxuries. 
Founded on our unparalleled progress in the natural 
sciences, our material progress has itself been unparalleled. 
Never, in all history, was any age distinguished like ours 
for brilliaut applications of science to industry and com- 
merce ; for discoveries and inventions which have at once 
revolutionized all industrial pursuits, and the whole com- 
mercial intercourse of the civilized world. To enumerate 
every instance of material progress, would consume days 
and weeks, as witness the annual reports of our Patent 
Offices. The whole subject, indeed, is too generally known 
to require to be dwelled upon. Minor improvements are 
a matter of every day occurrence. The great inventions 
have lost their novelty. ^We have become familiarized 
with the gigantic powers of the Steam Engine; we hardly 
notice the hum of the myriad wheels and levers it sets in 
motion; we are used to its rapid, finished workmanship, 
and its untiring energies ; — the long train of men and 
merchandise, whirled across the continent; the boat breast- 
ing the rapid stream ; the steamship battling with the tem- 
pest; all these have lost their sublimity. From sea to sea, 



40 The Age of Progress. 

lightning is our familiar messenger, it must soon enable 
Europe and America to communicate across the storms of 
the Atlantic. We have become accustomed to every new 
form of our material civilization ; to new commercial ideas ; 
to the intimate dependence of nation upon nation ; to the 
general prosperity or distress produced in every quarter 
of the globe, by the prosperity or distress of a single 
country; to new social conditions of every description, 
created by new inventions. What would have appeared, 
a hundred years ago, as fabulous, as the visions of an 
Arabian tale, has become to us mere matter of fact. We 
have ceased to wonder at any of the effects of our mate- 
rial progress, however new in the history of the world. 
Yet, we may review all the social, industrial, commercial 
revolutions in the 6,000 years of human history, and we 
shall discover but one epoch which can at all be compared 
with ours. That single period we shall find at the close 
of those ages which it is the fashion of our day to stigma- 
tize as Dark Ages. But in spite of sarcasm and contempt, 
it will remain true forever, that the genius of invention 
created the press under the influence of the old religion; 
the genius of discovery sailed to the shores of a new world, 
under the shadow of the cross ; the sons of the Middle 



The Age of Progress. 41 

Ages, nurtured in the old despised Religion, laid the 
foundation of our own progress; in their day they wrought 
social and commercial changes, almost as brilliant as our 
own, and more glorious because they had not forgotten to 
be grateful to that Church, whose action had raised the 
nations of Europe from barbarism to splendid civilization. 
Without her action we should, at this day, be wanderers 
in the forest, like our barbarian forefathers. 

Our age forgets that gratitude is a duty. It likewise 
often forgets the miseries its spirit of Material Progress 
has engendered. Indeed when we look only at the sur- 
face of things, the glitter of our modern civilization ap- 
pears so dazzling, that we are apt to overlook the dark 
scenes concealed beneath it. Yet the distress of the age, 
with all its varied forms of wretchedness presents a picture 
far more interesting in its sadness than the brightest page 
in the history of our Material or Intellectual Progress. 
But as the subject has been lately treated in this hall, I 
shall offer but one or two remarks upon it ; to give some 
degree of completeness to this historical sketch oi the Age 
of Progress. 

The distress of our times has in great part arisen from 
our very Progress. The machine had replaced the arm 



42 The Age of Progress. 

of the laborer. In the older and more thickly settled 
countries, it has taken bread from the table, fuel from the 
hearth, cheerfulness from the wretched dwellings of thous- 
ands on thousands of families, once happy in the frugal 
enjoyment of the hard-earned fruits of daily labor. From 
the intimate commercial dependence of nations upon each 
other it has followed, that a revolution in one country 
stops the wheels of industry all over the civilized world, 
and carries famine to the cottage of the mechanic. 

Modern progress has produced huge riches : it has 
likewise produced intense selfishness, a second great 
cause of distress. Selfishness alone is responsible for 
the existence of squalid want, famine and starvation, 
in the midst of plenty. It is because wealth has made 
men selfish, that we find, back of the street lined with 
palaces, where wealth lives in unpitying luxury, the 
crowded lane, the fetid court, the under-ground den, 
where haggard misery crouches in despair ; — starvation 
the next neighbor to overgrown riches ; — the earthen 
hovel open to the December blast, by the side of the 
palatial residence. The selfishness of wealth has invent- 
ed the gloomy work-house, the prison of poverty, where 
the pauper, to escape starvation, must barter his liberty 



The Age of Progress. 43 

for a morsel of hard bread. In the English coal mine 
it allows the existence of still darker forms of wretch- 
edness. Far away from the cheerful light of day, bent 
upon the mineral, degraded in its own estimation, 
extracting fuel for the wealthy manufactory, — down 
there in the deep, dark coal mine, there is a forgotten 
mass of human labor — there is the English Coal-digger, 
a species of w T retch who has no equal in Christian lands, 
wearing away his miserable existence, from father to 
son, in ignorance whether Christ ever existed, seldom 
hearing the name of God — living and dying excluded 
even from the consolations of religion, the last comfort 
of human affliction. 

These scenes of distress, exhibited by a land which 
claims to stand at the head of modern progress, may 
find a counterpart in other countries. To some extent, 
perhaps, selfishness may succeed in palliating their 
enormity. But there is another scene of unexampled 
wretchedness for which England's tyranny alone is 
responsible. She has granted Catholic Emancipation, 
but she exterminates the Catholic people. Near that 
same rich English isle is another island, rich by nature, 
doomed to hopeless misery. The teeming fields of 



44 The Age of Progress. 

Ireland are the granary of England. Ireland's brave 
sons are the nerve of British armies, the bulwark of 
her empire. In her blind religious hatred, she calls 
Ireland prosperous when cattle have replaced the cot- 
tage, and entire villages are levelled by the crowbar, 
at the command of the merciless landlord. While 
she fattens on Ireland's wealth, she allows famine to 
decimate her population. While the luxuries of all 
her rich colonies are poured into her harbors, she 
allows the emigrant ship to sail forth loaded down 
with the victims of a famine, which her own exac- 
tions have created. If in one glance you would take 
in a scene of distress, such as no other age ever wit- 
nessed, look at the emigrant ship in years of famine, when 
its anchor is lifted, its white sails spread to the wind, and 
the exile of Erin bids farewell to his poor kindred, and 
the green fields of his unhappy country. On the shore 
there is a crowd of emaciated forms, gazing wistfully at 
the departing loved ones. They are too poor to fly from 
the inhospitable soil. Tyranny has doomed them to per- 
ish by the wayside. On deck there is a crowd, scarcely 
less wretched. There is the gray-haired sire trembling 
with age, casting, in speechless agony, a last glance at the 



The Age of Progress. .45 

home of his youth. There is the feeble mother, sobbing 
over her little ones, and perhaps peopling the unknown 
land with new oppressors, new persecutors, like those 
who have blighted her own. Follow the white sail 
across the Sea, — bearing off the load of so many broken 
hopes, so many withered affections ; descend into the hold, 
fraught with fever, the home of death ; listen to the loud, 
long wail of daily burial. The Ocean, from Liverpool to 
New York, is a wide grave for those poor children of 
oppression ; the ooze of the Sea, for three thousand miles 
is decked with their whitening bones. No age has ever 
witnessed such a scene of sorrow. A society clad in 
silks, and broad-cloth, the great, the learned, the mighty, 
look on with cold indifference, or contemptuous disgust. 
It is much if they allow a foreign nation to freight a ves- 
sel with the alms which they refuse from their own over- 
flowing coffers. Knowing that any year may bring back 
a repetition of the same harrowing scenes, they take no 
measure to mitigate the oppression which produced them. 
The victim departs and dies with a Christian's pardon, 
and a Christian's prayer for the nation that struck him 
down. But there is a God on high, who has heard every 
sigh, a God who has counted all the martyred dead. He, 



4:6 The Age of Progress. 

whose right hand destroyed all-ruling, persecuting Borne, 
has numbered the days of the persecutor. The hour 
must come, as it has come for all who have ever oppressed 
God's poor, when England, the proud mistress of the sea, 
she on whose world-encircling empire the sun forever 
shines, shall present in her world-wide wreck another 
moral to point another page in the dreadful history of 
persecutors. History shall point her finger to that wreck, 
and lifting her eye to heaven, say to the nations risen to 
greatness where England fell. Thus at last fall the mighty 
when they dare raise their hand against the Church of 
God, and trample upon the sorrows of the poor. 

This single instance of Ireland's oppression would 
suffice to show that great as has been the Material Pro- 
gress of the Age, Moral Progress forms no distinguishing 
characteristic even of a country most renowned for its 
material greatness. Indeed Moral Progress is not the 
characteristic of the age. 

Here I feel that I am entering upon a difficult question. 
Has there been in the last fifty years any marked increase 
of crime ? Is our age, all things considered, really worse 
than preceding ages? This question I shall not under- 



The Age of Progress. 47 

take to decide ; but there are some forms of crime which 
appear to me to be decidedly peculiar to our age. 

A spirit of lawless speculation, causing frequent revul- 
sions of capital, general failures, universal distress ; pre- 
meditated bankruptcies, entailing the ruin of orphans and 
widows, including the deliberate theft of the hard-earned 
wages of the laborer ; such crimes among our forefathers 
would have been a topic of conversation for a life-time ; 
among us they are so frequent, that the press has ceased 
to notice them, unless they are accompanied with some 
circumstances of startling enormity. Ordinary crimes 
of this nature are accomplished in forms which enable 
the criminal to escape the law, and live on respected as a 
man of honor. 

Excessive love of wealth, the source of these crimes, 
deadens the heart to the influences of religion, and leads 
to infidelity. Infidelity may not be as loudly insolent now 
as it was in the last century, nor attack God with its old 
cynic contempt of public decency, but it has reproduced 
itself in forms peculiar to our age. It has given rise to 
revolutionary theories, aiming at the subversion of all 
government ; to socialistic theories, attacking the founda- 
tion of property ; to communistic theories, aimed at the 



48 The Age of Progress. 

m 

destruction of the family ; to materialistic theories, seek- 
ing the destruction of human dignity. Infidelity has 
gone so far as to teach that property is theft, vice is vir- 
tue, and God is evil.* These theories are proclaimed in 
open day, because amid a world, given up to self-interest, 
and grown half infidel, their authors scarcely find a 
manly voice to oppose them. They rely on the approval, 
and support of wretched masses of ill-rewarded, discon- 
tented labor. They rely on the ambition of demagogues, 
who, in times like ours, never want the will to kindle the 
spark of discontent into the flame of rebellion. Often 
brought up without religion, taught by the example of 
those above them to regard wealth as the chief good, 
there are armies among the wretched, ever ready to look 
on the rich as criminals, and to hold all government un- 
just which does not place wealth, or at least bread, in 
their own hands. Conspiracy finds its natural food in 
the dark lane, the cold garret, the damp cellar. There 
crime festers in its rags ; there murder learns its trade in 

* " God is but folly and timidity ; God is but hypocrisy and deceit ; God is but 
tyranny and misery ; God is evil." 

Proudhon, System of Contradictions, C. VIII. 
(Ap. Cortes, B. II. C. I., p. 184.) 
"The true remedy against fanaticism .... is to prove to humanity 
that God, if he exists, is its enemy." 

Id. Ibid., (Ap. Cortes, p. 179.) 



The Age of Progress. 49 

sullen silence. There, back of the palace, grows up a 
society nurtured to hatred, awailing its hour to wreak 
merciless vengeance on those who trample on their help- 
lessness. There Red-Republicanism recruits its ranks ; 
there is the standing menace to European society ; there 
the focus of those frequent commotions, whose temporary 
excesses portend what they will accomplish, when all the 
flood-gates of hoarded hatred are opened. Red-Republi- 
canism is a spirit as fierce as that which changed France, 
but little more than fifty years ago, into a den of wild 
anarchy, where the passions of the atheist glutted them- 
selves with the blood of the best men ; where a mob, 
drunk with the blood of new martyrs, worshiped a naked 
outcast as the goddess of reason, and saluted the guillo- 
tine as the redeemer of the nation. That spirit is the 
standing menace of European society ; it is at the root of 
the great social evil of Europe, the permanent revolu- 
tionary state, the great socialistic conspiracy, necessitating, 
in times of apparently profound peace, huge standing ar- 
mies, to protect society against its own members. Often 
breaking through all restraints, inaugurating the reign 
of massacre, convulsing nations, displacing dynasties, it 

forces the best portions of European communities to look 
4 



50 The Age of Progress. 

forward to the future with dismal forebodings; it makes 
the wisest feel as if they lived in a land of earthquakes 
and volcanoes, not knowing whether the morrow's sun 
will not rise on a world of anarchy, above which Red- 
Republicanism shall be seen to wave its bloody hand, the 
signal of a new Reign of Terror. 

Infidelity, likewise, is at the root of the Italian secret 
society; it inspires its horrid oaths, its hatred of religion, 
its hypocrisy putting on, at need, the mask of piety ; it 
breathes the spirit of midnight assassination ; it nerves 
the hand that plies the dagger in the dark ; it presides at 
the midnight conventicle, where conspiracy learns the art 
of murder from the art of the surgeon. Fiercely deter- 
mined to subvert religion, by subverting morality, it 
labors to corrupt the morals of the nations by poisoning 
the morals of youth. When its hour of triumph came, 
in 1848, it invented the well known horrid rites, and 
prompted the vile orgies of the Italian revolution. The 
same spirit, invading monarchs, has made them wage war 
for an idea, which was a lie to justice. It has led them 
to wage war for the Mahometan : to sacrifice for the main- 
tenance of Turkish power, the lives of the sons of the 
Crusaders. At Naples it made sworn ministers betray 



The Age of Progress. 51 

their sovereign — the youthful, chivalrous, brave Francis. 
Ingrained hypocrites, they sapped their country's strength, 
while pretending to build up its power. When their plot 
was ripe, and the hordes of Garibaldi had landed in Cala- 
bria, they gave up their own country, bound hands and 
feet, to the tender mercies of a ruffian soldiery, collected 
from all the sewers of European depravity. About the 
same time, we beheld another novel spectacle of consum- 
mate hypocrisy, only matched by its subsequent unex- 
ampled effrontery. We beheld Piedmont, at first in 
secret league with the red-shirt of the revolution, and the 
murderous stiletto of the Carbonari, attacking Naples 
and the Sovereign Pontiff in the disguise of friendship j 
then throwing off the mask, and avowing their alliance, 
in her impudent trust that a corrupt public opinion would 
applaud her ; lending open aid to Garibaldi to despoil the 
Venerable Pontiff of his small possessions, outraging her 
own Catholic people, and insulting for years the loudly 
declared sentiments of 200,000,000 of men, who regard 
Pius IX. as the representative of Christian civilization, 
cling to him as the centre and bulwark of Christian faith, 
revere him as the heaven-appointed vice-gerent of God. 
Springing from corruption, Infidelity leads to worse 



52 The Age of Progress. 

corruption. We owe to it, in our own country, that 
monstrous birth Mormonism, a new Mahonietanism 
sprung from the infidel corruption of our civilization — as 
the old Mahomet sprung from the infidel corruption of 
the Arabian desert — looming up in the heart of the coun- 
try, as a nation within a nation, with a code of laws whose 
basis is immorality, with a religion whose essence is com- 
bined vice and impiety. 

Demon-worship is another monstrous offspring of the 
same prolific parent. Demon-worship, expelled 1800 
years ago, has re -appeared under the form of spiritism, 
and re-awaked the very spirit of ancient oracles, long 
silenced by the voice of the Gospel. The medium re- 
places the Pythoness, the spirit-meeting stands for Del- 
phi and Dodona. Spiritism, starting up in an obscure 
corner, spreading over the world like a plague, still 
maintaining its empire, far and wide, though just now 
public attention is withdrawn from it by more absorbing 
events, has given cause to dread that a large portion of 
civilized society is ready to relapse into some new and 
threatening form of paganism. 

Infidelity serves to explain several other species of 
crime existing among us. It explains our marked reck- 



The Age of Progress. 53 

lessness of human life ; the exquisite forms of treachery 
often starting out of the polish of our manners, like 
hideous asps darting out of the smooth green-sward; 
startling apparitions of corruption occasionally rising up 
from among the higher ranks of life, rending the veil, 
disclosing unknown depths of depravity underlying the 
surface of our civilization, proving that morality is under- 
mined, and leaving us in suspense whether or not we 
should regard the splendor of our material progress, as 
forming but a brilliant covering of a darkly heaving mass 
of unrevealed corruption. 

This much, however, is certain, that the spirit of infi- 
delity sprung from corruption, has undertaken to com- 
plete the corruption. It proposes to educate youth 
without religion, to support government without morality, 
society without God. Scorning all religion, the deter- 
mined and eternal enemy of God and man, wherevefc it 
exists, it enkindles the spirit of religious persecution. A 
traitor at heart to all government, of which it saps 
the two-fold foundation, Religion and morals, it accuses 
those who worship God and obey his Church, of hos- 
tility to the land of their birth or the land of their 
adoption. It continues the history of its pagan prototype. 



54 The Age op Progress. 

Of old, no calamity could befal the Roman empire, but 
the infidel rabble of Rome, would shout with all its 
voices. " The Christians to the lions." Let a calamity 
befall a country in our day, and our infidel press will dis- 
cover that Catholics are at the root of the evil, which 
their own hypocritic fanaticism may have in part occas- 
ioned. Does it not rise here — did it not rise shortly 
after the Mexican Campaign — where Catholic blood was 
poured out like water, to uphold the honor of the Stars 
and Stripes — did it not rise in all its cynic impudence, 
take its stand upon the piles of our dead heaped upon every 
bloody battle-field, and tell the country North and South, 
East and West, that Catholics, forsooth, are the eternal 
enemies of the republic for which they die ! Here, as in 
Italy, it loves the mid-night conventicle — it takes secret 
oaths, for purposes which it has not the manliness to 
avow to the world. It invades the Sanctuary of Virgins 
consecrated to God ; it arms the convent-burner with a 
torch — it organizes the Know-Nothing Massacre. Its 
history is written in the ruins of Charlestown, and in the 

blood-stained streets of Louisville. Let a war break out 
in any portion of the world, it will keep aloof from dan- 
ger, when the voice of its bleeding country implores its 



The Age of Progress. 55 

aid ; it will gloat over the terrors of the contest while 
blood will aid to fill its coffers — infidelity, a living vam- 
pire; feeding and fattening on the generous dead. 

I might proceed further in the history of the crimes 
of our Age of Progress, but I shall have occasion to re- 
turn to this subject in the last lecture of this course. Let 
us turn for a moment to a more cheerful theme. 

Our age, indeed, is an age of extraordinary contrasts. 
Side by side with the triumphs of scientific invention, 
rise the triumphs of infidelity ; unprecedented miracles 
of progress, are deformed by deeds of monstrous iniquity. 
Our exuberant wealth brings out but the more darkly the 
gloomy outlines of overwhelming distress. 

Our age has produced, flourishing side by side with 
irreligion, vice, degradation — as the lily breathes in the 
same atmosphere with the thorn, the palm with the 
upas — a very harvest of purity, generosity, lofty hero- 
ism, martyrdom, which in the eye of high Heaven ren- 
ders this sad earth still lovely, still worthy of the angels' 
smile, still deserving of God's choicest benedictions. 

Charity, leaning over the plague stricken ; charity, 
amid the storm of battle, peacefully bending over the 
dying soldier ; charity, in the calm purity of the cloister, 



56 The Age op Progress. 

laboring in silence to redeem the poor, cast-off child of 
sin ; charity, replacing a mother's affection, around the 
hearth of the orphan ) charity, in the garb of the Little 
Sister of the Poor, going through the driving winter's 
sleet, to knock at the gates of wealth, and beg in the 
name of Christ a crust of daily bread, for a poor suffering 
brother : all this you have heard extolled with matchless 
eloquence ; all this you may witness daily and hourly ; 
all this magnificence of virtue is so common even in our 
age, that you will scarcely find more numerous examples 
of it in the heroic ages of Christianity. 

The ancient, venerable church does not grow old. 
Loaded with eighteen centuries of honor, she is fresh as 
when she sprang, in heavenly beauty, from the hands of 
her divine founder. " Time writes no wrinkle on her im- 
mortal brow." Now, as ever, He whose life is her life, 
redeems the world. Still, as in her early days, amid the 
foul corruption of pagan Rome, she produces holiness 
and purity, which make men say, " Behold, she is the 
Church of God." And the learned of England, and the 
proudest and haughtiest of all nations, come from heresy, 
come from infidelity, come from paganism, come to her 



The Age of Progress. 57 

and fall at her feet, and seek from her the life that vivifies 
the world. 

Around the ruined thrones of Kings, whose mad con- 
spiracies, in the last century, had nearly broken up the 
sources of Catholic Missions, the spirit of Apostleship 
has revived with its ancient ardor. In the palm groves 
of India, the successors of DeBritto combat the cruel 
pantheism of the Brahmin. The inheritors of the spirit 
of Xavier take up his labors among the sons of his fervent 
converts in the kingdom of Travancore, In China, the 
Apostle halts not timidly around bristling forts and armed 
shipping, with nations at his back to avenge his wrongs ; 
but all alone, with the cross upon his cassock as his only 
armor, braving the cangue and the cage, he seeks to 
gather around the cross, which European valor has 
erected on the Cathedral of Pekin, the remnants of a 
hundred and fifty years of devotion. In Lassa, on the 
far borders of Thibet, he attacks in their stronghold, the 
prejudices of 3,000 years of superstition. On the threshold 
of Japan in the neighborhood of Sancian, memorable for 
similar devotion, he awaits the hour when commercial in- 
terests shall reopen the barriers which commercial avarice 
closed, and enable him to reap the rich harvests of 



58 TnE Age op Progress 

faith promised by the blood of thirty thousand Japanese 
Martyrs. He follows the track of the explorer, and in 
the skull-paved halls of the King of Dahomey, he would 
gladly ransom with his blood the myriad victims of Afri- 
can despotism. From some forgotten Isle, embosomed 
in the Pacific, he leads to Europe, to the shrines of the 
Apostles, the converted sons of the cannibal chieftain. 
He follows the emigrant across the steppes of Russia, 
and the pampas of South America. He is on the banks 
of the Amazon, and at the head-waters of the Parana. 
He plants the cross above the wild gorges of the Andes, 
or carves it on the granite peak overlooking our great 
western Savannahs. At the sources of the Mississippi 
and Missouri, he seeks the Indian in his wigwam, or fol- 
lows the Blackfoot in his hunt across the wintry plain, 
at the foot of the Northern Rocky Mountains. He is 
among the deadly lagoons of Guiana to receive the last 
breath of the political prisoner. A martyr to his zeal, 
or a martyr to his faith, falling by the sword of the 
mandarin, or by the heat of the marsh -fever, he continues 
the apostolic fervor of all ages, the combats of the Roman 
Amphitheatre, the martyr -spirit that regenerates the 
world. 



The Age op Progress. 59 

In all ranks, the eye of religion still discovers hearts 
unmoved by the world's siren song, souls obedient to 
ever}' holy impulse, generous hearts open to every want, 
bands of brothers united, heart and hand, in the holy 
crusade of charity. Need I name again the Society of 
St. Vincent de Paul ? Need I tell again of men of rank 
and influence, moved by the same holy devotion in Europe 
and America, making it a law of their lives to visit the 
poor man's dreary cabin, and sanctify their own lives by 
bringing joy to the fireside of forgotten suffering? Or 
need I name that glorious association of the Propagation 
of the Faith, an institution of our own age, wide as the 
world, gathering the widow's mite, as well as the rich 
man's offering, and with the united charities of all seeking 
to aid in kindling the torch of faith in the darkness of 
every heathen land ? Or need I speak of that scarce less 
glorious Association of the Holy Childhood, that touching 
inspiration of the genius of charity in our age, redeem- 
ing with the alms of the little ones of Christian lands, 
the little ones whom the Chinese mother heartlessly 
throws by the wayside as fit food for dogs and swine? 
When future generations shall read the annals of this 
Age of Progress, they will linger with tears over the 



60 The Age of Progress. 

pathetic page telling of all these holy deeds, and deem it 
a brighter, because holier page, than all the bright rolls 
on which Material and Intellectual Progress shall em- 
blazon their glories. 

It would be an endless task to dwell on all the triumphs 
of Religion during the last sixty years. One more of 
these triumphs, in concluding, I cannot pass over without 
a brief notice. Three times in sixty years the sover- 
eign Pontiff has been dragged or driven from the Quirinal. 
At this moment when kings have plundered him, and 
Piedmontese and Carbonari are quarrelling around the 
poor remnant of his small estate, the spontaneous devotion 
of the Catholic world has renewed the venerable old 
offering of Peter's Pence. A country still deeply Catholic, 
in spite of the wrongs committed in her name, France, 
forces her sovereign who has shown little zeal in the 
cause of the holy see, to stand guard at the palace gate 
of Pius IX, and ward off aggressors, even at the risk of 
falling by the revolutionary dagger. Faith may grow 
cold in the hearts of the many ; in the souls of the few 
it burns with unwonted fires. The world, a few years 
since, witnessed the return of a species of devotion, so 
little known in modern times, that it seemed to belong, 



The Age of Progress. 61 

as their peculiar glory, to the chivalrous old Ages of 
Faith. Amid the attacks of new infidels, the spirit of 
ancient chivalry is suddenly rekindled. France, Belgium, 
Ireland, Spain, send forth to generous warfare the noblest 
sons of Europe. On the rock of Spoleto, on the plains 
of Castel Fidardo, in the Fortress of Ancona, if they 
could not conquer against overwhelming odds, they still 
offered an energetic protest, with their hearts' best blood, 
for truth against a lie, for outraged right and justice 
against hypocritic power. All honor to them, all honor 
to him the brave old African Chieftain, immortal Lam- 
oriciere, the heroic leader of a heroic band, the Godfrey 
of a degenerate age. If his name, if their names, are 
not brightened with the halo of victory, they shall go 
down through all time radiant with the more glorious light 
of heroic devotion in one of the holiest causes in which 
a warrior ever drew his sword, or soldier ever shed his 
blood. While faithful history shall live, to speak of 
powers inventing hypocritic theories of non-intervention, 
or rejoicing with the joy of the ungenerous at the downfall 
of the helpless representative of 1800 years of Christian 
civilization, it will love to repeat how the brave fell nobly 
on the hopeless field of honor ; how the spirit of chivalry 



62 The Age of Progress. 

redeemed, by its own unsullied sacrifice, a portion of the 
invader's shame. Remembered when the unholy bays of 
the conqueror have withered, and fallen to the dust; 
when national iniquity, applauded and exultant now, is 
judged and condemned; when the invader's sceptre has 
passed to other hands, and his throne to another dynasty ; 
honored, when Garibaldi and Piedmont are brought to 
the pillory of the world's execration; honored, while a 
glow of manly enthusiasm can be kindled in a human 
breast, their names will awaken, in all coming genera- 
tions, the response deserved by disinterested valor. 
And she, the great survivor of all ruins, and all ini- 
quities, the immortal remembrancer of all good deeds, 
the church for whom they bled, will, in her ever youth- 
ful career through the ages, treasure their memories in 
her heart of hearts, among the holy recollections of her 
long life of warfare. 

While such devotion remains on earth, crime cannot 
triumph altogether. The deeds, that would deface, in 
the eyes of posterity, the glories of our Intellectual 
and Material Progress ; that would make the nineteenth 
century be known in history as an age, rich, it may 
be in inventions and discoveries, but dimmed by ini- 
quities as enormous as its progress was splendid, will 



The Age of Progress. 63 

borrow from such devotion a lustre which envy cannot 
lessen, nor crime impair ; which, like the mid-day sun 
hiding the broad spots upon its surface, will conceal, 
in its own pure splendor, much of the darkness of the 
age. 

Ten thousand inventions will be forgotten. The 
most delicate wheel-work of our machinery may come 
to be despised as the gross handiwork of art in its 
infancy. The newness of discovery fades as it floats 
down the stream of time. The brilliancy of genius is 
overshadowed by more brilliant genius ; progress 
obscured by brighter progress. The voice of the 
victor's fame, like the sound of his battles, dies away. 
Time will tear many a flower from the garland with 
which we love to bind the brows of this Age of Pro- 
gress ; but the chivalrous deed, the unselfish devotion, 
the burning charity, the apostle's zeal will bloom for- 
ever. With him who inspired them, with her who 
fostered them, each holy deed shall shine, when the 
last wreck of all human progress has vanished — shall 
live, when time cannot touch one single leaf in the 
immortal coronal, which virtue's hand has placed upon 
the brow of the Age of Progress. 



64 The Danger of the Age. 



THE DANGER OF THE AGE. 

The history of the Age, considered as an Age of 
Progress, which I attempted to delineate in my last 
lecture, may be summed up in a few words. As 
regards progress in the natural sciences, the nineteenth 
century stands at the head of ages. Its material pro- 
gress has revolutionized the industry, commerce, ideas, 
manners and intercourse of civilized society. It has 
developed enormous wealth, but, in populous countries, 
it has produced that fearful disease of modern times, 
pauperism. With respect to Moral Progress, while 
crime has assumed novel forms of gigantic iniquity, 
virtue has risen by its side with a lustre worthy of the 
bright ages of Christianity. 

Thus far, truth and error, virtue and vice, have 
gained only partial triumphs. Which of them will ul- 
timately obtain the ascendant? Without attempting 
to decide a question, placed beyond the limit of human 



The Danger of the Aoe. 65 

foresight, I shall endeavor to-night to point out the 
peculiar danger of the age — the evil which, unless 
arrested or checked, must end by ruining our pro- 
gress. 

The predominant evil of the age, its peculiar danger, 
I take it, is the materialistic spirit. I do not say that 
materialism is our only danger. Pride, sensuality, cu- 
pidity sj)ring up forever from human corruption, form 
the common menace of all time, and explain all the 
ruins of history. Nor do I refer to that form of mate- 
rialism which denies the immortality of the soul. Few 
men in any age will so far abdicate the dignity of 
manhood, as to choose to rank merely as the first in 
the scale of the brute creation. The materialism to 
which I refer, is practical rather than theoretical. It 
places material interests and materialistic passions 
above the interests of the soul and the claims of virtue. 
Materialism, thus denned is the Danger of the Age . I 
shall briefly consider its extent, its effects, and the 
means to avert it. 

The extent of the danger is easily ascertained by 
comparing the place which material progress and ma- 
terial interests occupy in popular estimation, with the 



66 The Danger of the Age. 

position assigned to them by reason and religion. 
Moral progress, religion, virtue should hold the first 
place in man's esteem : material progress and material 
interests should occupy a subordinate position. This 
doctrine does not condemn material progress. Let 
man assert his native dominion over the elements. 
Let him compel wind and wave and lightning to do 
his bidding and perform his labor. Let him whiten 
every sea with the canvas of his fleets, and fill every 
vale with the hum of his industry. He may embody his 
ideal of power, strength, beauty, sublimity, in works 
which imitate, by the grandeur or delicacy of their 
proportions, the creative thought and the creative act 
which moulded the flower and built the heavens. Let 
him "fill the earth and subdue it." All this is but a 
legitimate assertion of his sovereignty, a proof of his 
high origin, the gift of God, the fulfilment of the divine 
benediction. But let him not bend the knee to his 
own handiwork. By the nobler portions of his being, 
by the boundless aspirations of his immortal spirit, by 
the kindling glance of his eye as he gazes up to heaven, 
the voice of God and the voice of reason tell him, in 
tones which intelligence cannot mistake, nor corrup- 



The Danger of the Age. 67 

tion deafen, that his first, his chief, his last progress is 
moral progress ; his true course is upward, in the 
direction of his eternal destiny; — his aspirations, like 
the mountain cross, the symbol of the soul, should soar 
to heaven. 

Judged by this standard, the age evidently has out- 
stepped the limits within which material interests should 
be confined. It points to the miracles of its material pro- 
gress as man's whole progress ; to steamboats and steam en- 
gines, to net-works of railroads, and telegraph lines, to 
new systems of commerce and industry, as the great signs 
of the superiority of its civilization. The materialistic 
spirit has its temple in the counting-house, where it wor- 
ships unceasingly at the shrine of the Almighty Dollar. 
It rules the destinies of nations, dictates war and peace, 
makes and breaks treaties. It sacrifices a hundred thous- 
and men, sons of the Crusaders, upon the snows of the 
Crimea, to uphold on the fairest portions of Europe, the 
sensual standard of Mahometan degradation. The science 
of materialism, is the art of amassing wealth ; its code of 
morals, physical enjoyment. It scorns the disinterested 
devotion of religious heroes, and the unselfish labor of 
the cloister ; heaps its unmeasured sarcasms on all who 



68 The Danger of the Age. 

choose to despise the earth, and devote their lives to heaven. 
It creates despotism and cruelty in the higher ranks, 
dissatisfaction in the lower, restlessness everywhere. You 
may see its unwholesome workings in the recklessness 
which makes or squanders a fortune in a day ; in rapacity, 
unchecked by any principle of charity or justice ; in craft, 
cunning and deceit; in the faithless contract, and the 
gigantic fraud ; in the revel which consumes in an hour 
what would suffice to feed and clothe the poor of a city. 
You may read it on the faded brow of youth, in the was- 
ted morals of the factory, in the weakening of family ties, 
in the fierce independence of the stripling. Its history 
is the long list of wrongs inflicted on the widowed and 
the fatherless. Its heartlessness would make the poor, 
like the machines of its industry, mere producers to feed 
its luxury. Distress, murder, starvation follow in its 
wake. Its echo is the sigh of the needle-woman, the loud 
wail of pauperism, the curse of oppressed labor, the mut- 
tered sound of socialistic revolutions. 

Another sign of the prevalence of the materialistic 
spirit, is the popular literature of the day. A vast por- 
tion of it breathes the very spirit of sensuality. It seeks 
not its inspiration in the heroic devotion of self-sacrifin- 



The Danger of the Age. 69 

ing virtue, nor yet in the hallowed sphere of disinterested 
patriotism, nor even in the ennobling associations of a 
virtuous home. The harp that consecrates its harmonies 
to a Christian theme, is unheeded, except by a few kindred 
spirits. To be popular, literature must descend from no- 
ble sentiment to corrupt sensation, from the pure regions 
of virtue, to the contaminated purlieus of vice. Sensual 
in its ideal, its subject, its tone, its purpose, the expression 
of covetousness and luxury, it has learned the art of mak- 
ing man's noblest aspirations, his most spiritual senti- 
ments, the panders of sensuality. The materialistic spirit 
is the reason of the popularity of such authors as Eugene 
Sue, Alexander Dumas, George Sand. It is typified in 
Les Miserables of Victor Hugo. The multitudinous race 
of similar writers is one of the saddest signs of the age. 
Modern society is flooded with their contaminating pro- 
ductions. 

I had intended to dwell at some length on the materi- 
alistic theories of our world-reformers. A word or two 
will suffice. Like Yoltaire, the mass of them aspire to 
dethrone God. Like him they denounce Christ, hate his 
cross, or, while impudently claiming him as their leader,* 

D. Cortes, B. iii. 



70 The Danger of the Age. 

aspire to replace the purity of his doctrine by the vile- 
ness of their own dogmatism. The fires of the old atheis- 
tic revolution have died away on the soil of Europe. So* 
cialistic revolutions have risen from its ashes, and per- 
petuate its spirit among the wretched multitudes of Euro- 
pean Capitals. In our own country, infidel revolution- 
ists boldly parade in the streets with torch and emblazoned 
banner, in honor of Tom Paine. They denounce death to 
the Papacy, because the Papacy is the bulwark of Christi- 
anity, because the Catholic Church is the sole power on 
earth that can check the triumph of the materialistic 
principles, of which they bear the ignominious standard. 
The Church, indeed, they cannot conquer. She is im- 
mortal. Nor is the danger to the martyr who may bleed 
in the holy cause. While the disciples of materialism 
shall display their banners in honor of their masters, 
men of soul will not be wanting to point the finger of 
scorn at the degraded procession, or sadly say, " There 
march the great enemies of the human race." While in- 
fidelity and vice shall raise a monument to the Apostles of 
materialism, faith and virtue will come and mourn around 
the tomb, and inscribe upon its tablets, " Here lie they for 
whom it were better had they not been born ! " But still 



The Danger op the Age. 71 

the spirit of infidelity, the spirit of infidel persecutions, 
is one of the dark symptoms of the prevalence of material- 
ism. A still darker sign is the assurance which prompts 
the leaders to put forward in public, the ignominious 
principles w r hich bear their name. Conscious that the 
aspirations of the age, far and wide, are kindred to their 
own, they speak with the unblushing boldness of a crimi- 
nal in the presence of his worse accomplice. 

In what I have said hitherto, I do not mean to imply 
that materialism has obtained anything like a universal 
sway. There are myriads in all lands, and in all ranks of 
society, who have not bowed the knee to Mammon. Till 
the last breath of materialism is stilled on earth, the Cross 
of the Redeemer rising aloft over the world, where his 
own power placed it, as the sign and centre of man's 
liberation from the thraldrom of matter, will twine the 
hearts of millions around it in the holy union of pure faith 
and exalted virtue. Millions will carry high in their own 
hands the sacred banner of the soul, of which the cross 
is the immortal symbol. 

But though materialism cannot destroy the cross, nor 
extirpate its followers, it may extirpate civilization and 
destroy nations. The great danger of materialism to 



72 The Danger of the Age. 

which I wish to direct your attention, is in its destructive 
effects on civilization and national existence. These ef- 
fects, whenever the materialistic spirit becomes widely 
predominant, are not difficult to foretell. No prophet is 
needed to lift the veil that enshrouds the future. History, 
with all its voices, proclaims one result of materialism, in 
all nations in which it ever ruled as the master spirit, and 
that is, the ruin of civilization first, and, as an inevitable 
consequence, final, irretrievable national downfall. 

" There is a moral of all human tales, 

'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, 

First freedom, and then glory, — when that fails, 

Wealth, vice, corruption, — barbarism at last." 

These energetic lines of one of the most gifted of our 
modern poets, himself at last a sad wreck of sensuality, 
sum up the entire history of the rise and fall of all civi- 
lization, and the story of the rise and ruin of all empires. 

Materialism explains the origin and existence of the 
savage state, the lowest condition of barbarism. Origi- 
nally, all nations and tribes were civilized, and highly 
civilized. In the plains of Sennaar before the dispersion 
of men, all had received the same civilizing traditions 



The Danger of the Age. 73 

transmitted from Adam and Noah to all their descendants. 
These traditions were variously developed in Chaldaea, 
Chanaan, Phoenicia, Egypt, and later in Greece and Eome 
Had history told us how these traditions were obscured 
or lost in barbarous China, India, Thibet, Japan, or 
among the savage tribes of Africa, America, and the isles 
of the Pacific, we should find in every instance, that the 
great cause of the degradation was the dominion of mate- 
rialism. It was clearly the cause of the ruin of the 
splendid civilization which flourished of old in central 
Asia, and along the coasts of the Mediterranean. The 
history of materialism is emphatically the history of na- 
tional degradation and national death. 

Nor is it difficult to trace the downward steps by which 
the degradation is accomplished. What distinguished 
true civilization from real barbarism, is the dominion of 
mind over matter. True enlightenment consists in the su- 
periority of mental and moral culture. Like individuals, 
nations remain really great only so long as the spirit re- 
tains its legitimate empire. Barbarism, in its essence, is 
the dominion of matter over spirit. 

Materialism begins by ruining moral greatness, and in 
ruining it exhausts the very sources of civilization. In- 



74 The Danger of the Age. 

tellectual ruin follows. Genius dies in the orgies of sen- 
suality. A corrupt, barbaric taste in art and letters, is 
succeeded by the arrest of Scientific progress. Civiliza- 
tion is disappearing. A lingering display of barbaric 
splendor alone survives, portending final destruction, as, 
on some sultry night-fall gilded masses of lurid storm- 
clouds foretell the destructive tempest of midnight. The 
last remnant of material progress is buried amid the ruins 
of the nation. 

Materialism, among us, is far from having reached its 
last or worst developments. We still possess in our midst 
so many evidences of true moral greatness, so much of 
glorious and progressive civilization, that we can hardly 
realize that the great element of ruin is gnawing at the 
core of our progress. But let us turn to ancient nations. 
Materialism embodies the whole philosophy of the history 
of their downfall. The subject well deserves to be stud- 
ied at some length. 

At an early date in the existence of ancient nations, 
materialism, in the form of idolatry, had implanted in 
them the seed of their decadence. In their decline, and 
when the cause of ruin was developed, we may not dis- 
cover that species of barbarism which was exhibited in 



The Danger of the Age. 75 

the invasions of the Northern barbarians ; but instead of 
the rough barbarism of the forest, we find the barbarism 
of an effete civilization, the genteel ruffianism of polished 
cities, the predominance of craft, deceit, treachery, cruelty ', 
all the more malignant because habitually concealed un- 
der the smooth forms of polite social intercourse. We 
find a State civilized upon the surface, barbarous and 
savage within ; a society cold, conceited, harsh, hypocrit- 
ical, apparently refined, but in reality, cruel, vindictive, 
cowardly, ignorantly proud or arrogantly vain of a little 
knowledge ; a condition worse in many points, than the 
barbaric or savage state, combining with the rude vices of 
the forest, all the exquisite corruption of the effeminate 
city. 

When Rome had reached the zenith of her material 
power ; when Europe, Asia, Africa lay bound in helpless 
subjection at her feet, it became evident that, in her 
gradual conquest of the world, she had by degrees con- 
centrated in her bosom all the moral diseases of the earth 
in their most empoisoned forms. The rival of Greece in 
art and science, unequalled in wealth and power, she wore 
in her imperial diadem all of grandeur, power, glory, 
which earthly genius and earthly success could place 



76 The Danger of the Age. 

upon the brow of the mistress of the world. But not a 
wreck was left of her moral greatness, no linsjerina: rem- 
nant of the comparative purity of her early manners ; no 
trace of the manly genius of her former statesmen ; scarce 
a vestige of the hardy spirit which had rendered her le- 
gions invincible on a thousand battle-fields. The burning 
pages of Tacitus and Juvenal bear witness to her almost 
incredible vices. Adoring degradation in her gods, she 
had formed her manners in the image of her debasing 
worship. She bore upon her brow, in deeply marked 
lines, which the splendor of her imperial crown could not 
conceal, the sign of a nation, which, with the fall of its 
moral greatness has relapsed into barbarism. Effeminacy, 
treachery, cruelty, were stamped there in all the livid 
hues of infamy. I need only point out her cruelty. 
Cruelty, — which in an individual is the seal of savage de- 
pravity, — cruelty typified in the savage torturing his cap- 
tive at the stake, — cruelty, when general in a nation, sets 
upon it the withering stigma of barbarism. In Rome 
cruelty was universal. Under Nero the bodies of Christ- 
ians served as torches to light up her maible squares and 
the midnight orgies of her princes and people. Her 
myriads — patrician, knight, high-born lady, and plebeian 



The Danger of the Age. 77 

mob — thronged the steps of the Coliseum to witness the 
deadly strife of the gladiator. Amid that gorgeous array 
of Roman pride and power, the Christian martyr alone 
held aloft the banner of human greatness. He alone, 
amid a nation of slaves, silent, calm, like his own Great 
Master, his eyes raised to heaven, his lips smiling with 
an angel's serenity, while the shouts of fifty thousand per- 
secutors demanded his death ; — the Christian Martyr, as 
his mangled form fell and his blood moistened the arena, 
told in his silent fortitude that a new era had dawned up- 
on the world. Materialism was conquered, man was free 
with the freedom of the soul, the immortal freedom of 
the redeeming cross. 

With her moral greatness, Rome had lost the last 
shadow of her liberties. Slaves to matter, the former 
rulers of the world, they who had swayed the destinies 
of Empires, bowed to the vilest ruffian upon whose shoul- 
ders the pretorian guard cast away the degraded purple; 
— bowed in cowering terror to vice incarnate upon the 
throne, as they bowed to vice divinized upon the altar; — 
to Tyranny armed with the Furies' scourge to chastise 
the arrogant degradation that dared to raise its unclean 
hand to slaughter the saints. 



78 The Danger of the Age. 

Rome's intellectual greatness, too, was extinguished in 
the thick darkness of her barbaric licentiousness. Ma- 
terialism had withered the genius of her poets as mate- 
rialistic despotism had silenced the voice of her orators. 
No Virgil rose again to sing the glories of her sires ; no 
Livy to inscribe her varied fortunes upon his "pictured 
page ;" no Horace to inspire her with his martial strain. 
The only men who towered above their fallen co-tempora- 
ries, were those men whom our materialistic age never 
mentions except with a smile of scorn — the grand old 
Fathers of the glorious Church of the Catacombs — the 
Ambroses, the Hilarys, the Augustines, the Chrysostoms, 
whose lofty genius shed a last ray on the crumbling glo- 
ries of the persecutor, and announced the " kindling dawn" 
of a more glorious civilization, silently rising from be- 
neath the shadow of the cross. 

The doom of Rome was sealed. Materialism had ru- 
ined all preceding empires. It had destroyed her rivals. 
More than her own arms, the moral degeneracy of other 
nations had placed in her hands the sceptre of the world. 
Materialism was destined to be her own ruin. Ambition 
alone cannot destroy a State. A nation which retains its 
moral energy, may be conquered; it is not therefore 






The Danger op the Age. 79 

ruined ; it rises from its fall to greater splendor. But an 
effeminate, barbaric civilization is powerless. It gives 
birth to no great leaders ; or if, at intervals, an individual 
rises above the mass of degradation, he finds around him 
but a cowardly rabble that can no longer be led to victory. 
Even physical courage, the last survivor of moral de- 
generacy dies away. Capua makes the soldiers of Han- 
nibal quail upon the field of battle. An effeminate race 
sinks beneath the tread of the first strong-willed conqueror 
issuing from his mountain fastnesses, with an army trained 
to hardships. Babylon succumbs to the yoke of a hand- 
ful of Persians and Medes. In his degeneracy, the Per- 
sian sees his millions hurled back in shame across the 
Hellespont. Greece, in the decline of her manly virtues, 
quails before the Macedonian phalanx. The remnant of 
her national energy revives but a moment under the lead- 
ership of Alexander, to die away forever, and leave her to 
fall with scarce a struggle, under the all-conquering sway 
of the still manlier Romans. Pome, in her turn, when 
she lies festering in barbaric corruption amid her golden 
palaces, falls ingloriously. Her wealth tempts the barba- 
rian hovering on her borders. Her Eagle, ennobled by 
a thousand years of victory, is trailed in the dust beneath 



80 The Banger op the Age. 

the banner of the woods, Nerveless successors of the 
Fabii and Scipios, her effeminate legions allow the forest- 
chieftain to revel in the halls of her Caesars. The lan- 
guage which had dictated laws to the world, becomes a 
jargon of barbaric tongues. Where it survives in its purity, 
in her matchless poets and orators, it lives as an everlast- 
ing memorial of her unequaled downfall. Home might 
have been regenerated by Christianity, but ere the change 
was accomplished, vengeance called forth the flood of 
Northern barbarism upon that land crimsoned with the 
blood of saints, and writing upon her blood-stained wreck 
the tragic fate which awaits the persecutor of purity, told 
the appalling moral of all human degeneracy. 

"History with all its volumes vast, 
Has but one page." 

That page is written in its ruins. Ruins are the grand 
instructors of history. The poet, the philosopher, the 
historian, the moralist love to linger around the impres- 
sive teachers, and learn from their silent eloquence. If 
you wish to read the desticy which awaits our own civi- 
lization, should materialism bring back its ancient cor- 
ruption, go to the shores of the Mediterranean, the seat 
of fallen empires; the tale is written on the ivy-clad walls 



The Danger of the An e. 81 

where " Ruin greenly dwells ;" in the dreary fragments of 
a hundred cities, \?here amid "matted weeds" the pilgrim 
11 stumbles over recollections" of glories dimmed forever 
in moral degradation. It is written in the still desert, 
where once the joyful rush of nations thronged to battle ; 
and on the solitary sea-shore, where the wealth of cities 
gathered the freighted galleys of world-wide commerce. 
It breathes in the rent arches of the Coliseum, in the si- 
lence of the old Martian field, in the triumphal column, 
where time has preserved, in mockery, the boastful tale 
of vanished victories. In Rome, ancient civilization has 
left only its ruins. There and in western Europe, new 
States have covered the wrecks of the Roman empire with 
the glories of Christian civilization. In the East the 
ruins of both Gentile and Christian civilization, mantled in 
the darkness of Moslem barbarism, and the wreck of 
Mahometanism, itself silently mouldering in its corrup- 
tion, present in one view, wherever you turn your foot- 
steps, a three-fold lesson of portentous warning. 

"Greece is living Greece no more." "She saw her 
glories, star by star, expire." Greece! memories from 
every classic vale and mountain, sad memories of many, 
many fallen glories, meet and mingle at the mention of 



82 The Danger of the Age. 

thine unrivalled name. O thou who shouldst have been 
immortal! Alas ! that thy worshipped graces planted the 
fatal tree, under whose softly insidious shade thy genius 
sank and slumbered, to rise or wake no more ! Eleusis, 
the sensual seat of the mysteries of Cora and Demeter, 
tells the story of her downfall. The present obscurity of 
Eleusis* is a fit emblem of her darkened glories. On 
the hillside of Delphi, not even a fragment of Paphian 
marble is left, to tell where the sensual son of Athens 
came to consult his oracular demon. Where Pindar sang 
and Demosthenes "thundered over Greece," the voice of 
genius no longer wakes an echo of her former triumphs. 
On the crags of Pindus the Albanian banditti sing their 
wild song of plunder. On the shores of Ionia, the lyre 
of Homer is replaced by the rude ditty of the fierce cor- 
sair. And, far more sad, the old Christian chant is si- 
lenced by the Muezzin's call from the Minaret. Greece 
is a land blighted by heaven's malediction. In Chris- 
tian times, known for heresy and schism and corrup- 
tion, the land which rejected the pure freedom of the 
cross, was bruised and crushed under the sensual bon- 
dage of the crescent. The Musulman still offers impi- 

* Now Lepsina. 



The Danger of the Age. 83 

ous worship in St. Sophia's; his tread defiles Tarsus 
and Antioch, and Smyrna, and Ephesus, all the hal- 
lowed ground consecrated by the early memories of the 
Apostles. The degenerate descendant of the old Hel- 
lenes feebly trims the lamp of liberty on the ruins of 
the once proud Acropolis. No Areopagus holds its sit- 
tings on the deserted hill of Mars; no Amphyctionic 
council assembles the States of Greece, under the his- 
toric mountain shade, at the passes of Thermopylae, to 
breathe wisdom into her councils. Among the Cyc- 
lades, over Idalia and Paphos, still waves the Turkish 
crescent; — still glances the turbaned host, in light 
caique, along the bright waters of her own iEgean. 
Over all the land materialism has traced its saddest 
memorial of w T oe ; and faith has added there to the 
moral that other impressive lesson, that the land where 
sensuality breathes heresy, and schism dares to touch 
the seamless garment of the Redeemer — is destined 
sooner or later, to be the land of the despot and the 
cringing slave. 

The "voiceless shores" of Phoenicia, the deserted vales 
of Judea — they too tell, in their mute eloquence, the 
same melancholy tale. Tyre, she "whose merchants 



84 The Danger of the Age. 

were princes and her traders the noblest of the earth,"* 
she who invited all nations to her sensual orgies, is 

succeeded by the lonely fisherman drying his net upon 
the silent sea-beach. On the heights of Carmel and 
Libanus, scarce grows there a solitary representative 
of the cedars sung by David. Sion is deserted; her streets 
in mourning ; her sons in their immortal wanderings, 
bear upon their brow the sign of the most appalling of 
all the fearful triumphs of materialism — the memory 
of the gloomy deed accomplished by carnalism, eighteen 
hundred years ago — the memory of the dismal day, 
darkened by the last sigh of the Creator upon the fear- 
ful heights of Golgotha. The hand of the Moslem for- 
bids the Christian to build upon her ruins. 

Cast a glance along " Afric's winding shore." It is 
blasted by the tread of the Mussulman. The coasts of 
Africa were among Rome's richest provinces. Car- 
thage is but a name. Hippo too is gone. Where was 
heard the eloquent voice of Cyprian, where Tertullian 
wrote his burning apologies, and St. Augustine sat at 
the head of councils, the sun of faith has set in the 
darkness of sensualism, or casts but a dim twilight 

* Isaiah. 



The Danger of the Age. 85 

glance upon barbarous dwellers. It is a region of Is- 
lam barbarism and ruin. 

Eastward lies the land of the pyramid and obelisk 
and labyrinth, the half-forgotten home of ancient learn- 
ing, the wreck of a civilization as grand as its colossal 
monuments, as mysterious as its hieroglyphics, and the 
sources of its rivers. Thither resorted the sages of 
Greece in the dim old ages of her founders, to learn 
from the Egyptian priesthood the rudiments of art 
and law, which made their own nation the noblest of 
the Gentile world. The civilization of Egypt became de- 
graded like the worship of her ox-god Apis. On her 
shores, too, rules the Mussulman. The Christian soli- 
tary no longer wakes the midnight echoes of Thebais 
with his sacred hymn. The holy legions long since 
fled before the tide of Moslem corruption. In the dead 
stillness of the South Egyptian desert, hundred-gated 
Thebes spreads her moss-grown columns, shattered 
remnants of gigantic statues and broken obelisks, over 
many a mile of barren soil, where once her hundred 
thousand warriors displayed their shining legions to do 
battle for the Pharaohs. The jackal's bark, under the 
ruined portico, replaces the nightly wassail of her mil- 



86 The Danger of the Age. 

lion worshippers of Onuphis. Along the rocky tract of 
Western Egypt, towards the Lybian desert, the 
Pyramids — huge remnants of forgotten art andgigantie 
ambition — still rise in their old mountain majesty, mute 
guardians of ruined edifices, statues, tombs, sphinxes 
heaped in confusion at their feet. They once over- 
looked fields fertilized by the sea-like waters of the 
Nile, or the vast sluices of Lake Moeris, the mightiest 
reservoir built by human hands : — fields which were the 
world's granary. Now they look down upon the dreary 
sands brought by the Simoon from the desert of 
Sahara. No scion of the ancient race appears on their 
winding stairway. The very reason of their existence 
is forgotten. The European traveler vainly asks of 
the broken sarcophagus in their hollow sides, or the 
hieroglyphic upon the vaulted granite, to explain the 
enigma of their destiny — whether meant as tombs for 
kings or gods. Tombs or temples, it is the same. 
There they stand, colossal monuments of gigantic 
downfall. "Forty centuries," said Bonaparte to his 
legions, " look down upon you from their summits." 
Vain pride ! It is the great voice of eternity which 



The Danger of the Age. 87 

issues from their imperishable depths: the hand of 
materialism which built them struck the nation down. 

Go to the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris. There 
Nineveh built those famous walls on which three chari- 
ots could drive abreast ; they have left no trace of their 
existence. There Babylon, the rival of Nineveh, raised 
to the heavens, "her tiara of proud towers,' 1 the guar- 
dians of her hundred brazen gates. They have moul- 
dered to the dust. 

The ruin of Assyria, the cradle of the human race, 
strikingly sums up the whole history of the downfall of 
nations, and abridges all the sad annals of materialism. 
All prophecy, from that which foretold the deluge to 
that which foretells the world's conflagration, repeats, 
with one voice, that materialism ends in ruin. When 
corruption has done its worst, if it does not destroy it- 
self, God intervenes for its destruction. He has at his 
command the floods that engulph the human race, the 
fires that consume the cities of the plain, the sword of 
the Persian and the Mede which annihilates Assyrian 
power. 

There is "high festival" in Babylon. It is the omi- 
nous eve predicted to all nations who forget their God 



88 The Danger of the Age. 

— omni genti obliviscenti Deum. — ISTo disaster is looked 
for. No nation which ever fell expected its destruc- 
tion. Men look for political convulsions, as they look 
for the storm. The cloud darkens the sky for a mo- 
ment ; it may leave some ruins in its path ; but presently 
the sun breaks through the gloom ; the heavens shine 
with a brighter blue, the field is fresher, the flower 
sweeter. Like our modern theorizers, men of old looked 
on present calamity as the harbinger of a more bril- 
liant future, and more splendid progress. Babylon 
deigns not even to read the prophetic page which con- 
tains the " burden of her woe." The festive lamp is lit 
in all her palaces. 

" And the soft night-breeze through her terrace bowers, 
Bore deepening tones of joy and melody 
O'er an illumined wilderness of flowers ; 
And the glad city's voice went up from all her towers." 

It is the last outburst of revelry of a splendid but 
effete and barbaric civilization. All crimes cumulate 
in this last debauch. The King, the sacrilegious im- 
personation of the licentiousness of his people, sits en- 
throned in the gorgeous hall, "high at the stately mid- 
night festival," amid adoring slaves and satraps. Sacri- 






The Danger, of the Age. 89 

lege flings its last insult up to heaven, and casts in the 
face of Omnipotence its last impotent defiance. "He 
who sleeps not," has marked that hour for his own. 
While the hand of sacrilege raises to its lips the sacred 
vessels of the Temple, the mysterious shadow moves 
its fingers along the shining wall. There, full in view, 
before the cowering throng, is written the enigma of 
the doom. One of those u who on the willows hung 
their captive lyres," interprets the fearful vision. The 
days are numbered, the iniquity is weighed, the scep- 
tre given to the Persian and the Mede. 

" E^e on the brow one fragile rose-leaf fade, 

The sword hath raged through joy's devoted train j 

Ere one bright star be faded from the sky, 

Eed flames, like banners, wave from dome and fane ; 

Empire is lost and won, Belshazzar with the slain. ,, 

Scarce a trace is left of the pride and power of the 

mightiest of cities that ever rose on earth. The moun- 
tain terraces of her hanging gardens have sunk to a 
level with the soil. The vast palaces of her Kings, 
which enclosed miles in their gorgeous magnificence, 
the golden halls where Balthasar " trembled at a 
shadow ; " are lost in unsightly pools. No wandering 



90 The Danger of the Age. 

Arab pitches his tent upon the desolate spot. Each 
word of prophecy is accomplished. It is the great 
warning of history — Materialism is the ruin of civiliza- 
tion. 

In modern nations, materialism has not yet led to 
the degradation which was the ruin of all the mighty 
empires which once rose and flourished and fell in cen- 
tral Asia and on the coasts of the Mediterranean, and 
ended in bowing nearly all those beautiful regions un- 
der the most degraded of anarchic despotism and Mus- 
sulman barbarism. We cannot realize the thought that 
our own civilization will ever sink under the hoof of 
some new Mahometanism, or fall beneath the anarchic 
sway of socialistic revolutions. But the principle of 
ruin, materialism, is the spirit of the age. It is gnaw- 
ing at the heart of our progress. The corruption it 
engenders is not self-correcting. The corruption of 
civilization never was, and never can be self-amending. 
Left to itself, it grows and spreads and cankers with 
each rising generation. Sow the seeds of ruin, you 
must reap the bitter fruit of destruction. The calami- 
ties of the age, the socialistic revolutions of Europe, 
portend ruin, as the storm-cloud portends the tempest. 



The Danger of the Age. 91 

Should society reach the maturity of its materialistic 
tendenc3 r , the ruins of our civilization, proportioned to 
the light of Christianity from which it fell, to the broad 
continents it covers, to the mighty powers accumula- 
ted by long centuries of progress, would present a 
wreck more piteous than all the ruins of all empires. 
The ruins of Babylon, Nineveh, Egypt, Greece, Home, 
all combined would lose their terrors in the unexam- 
pled horrors of the new disaster. 

But there is a remedy for the evil. There is a power 
that can stem the tide of materialistic corruption. The 
remedy is the triumph of the spirit over matter. The 
power is the Church. " He plucks up the foundation 
of all society," said Plato, two thousand years ago, 
M who plucks up religion."* Materialism destroys re- 
ligion. Gentile religion, itself materialistic, served but 
to hasten the ruin of society. The Christian religion, 
the Church alone, possesses the spiritualizing power 
necessary to preserve society from the destructive do- 
minion of the materialistic spirit; while materialism, 
by destroying religion, produces barbarism and ruin. 
The Church, by rendering the spirit predominant over 

* Laws B. x. 



92 The Danger oftheAge. 

matter, is the author of civilization and progress, and the 
condition of their duration. 

In this very hall on the ceiling above your heads, 
Christian art, in a happy hour of inspiration, has delinea- 
ted the true story of the triumph of the spirit over mat- 
ter. Yonder, in that halo of pure light with his modest 
train of virgin virtues around him, marching to the con- 
quest of the laughing deities, whose smile was the destruc- 
tion of ancient civilization, the genius of Christianity, 
bearing in his hand the symbol of the crucified, still holds 
out the promise that redeems the world from the domin- 
ion of the principle of ruin, — the cross — the immortal 
symbol, the immortal triumph of the spirit. 

Embodied in her who saved society, thirteen hun- 
dred years ago, from the mingling tide of Barbaric and 
Roman degradation ; impersonated in her who conquered 
Eome by the blood of her martyrs, and the Northern 
woodman by her holy purity and holy zeal ; living in her 
who was sent from Olivet, with the last blessing of the 
Redeemer upon her, (to teach the nations,) the genius of 
Christianity goes forth among the nations, and with the 
fire of faith enkindles the undying light of Christian 
civilization, — plants the cross above all its works, breathes 



The Danger of the Age. 93 

the spirit, the living, the immortal spirit of the cross into 
the very souls of nations. It is the genius of order, the 
genius of liberty, the genius of progress ; the eternal foe 
to the materialistic spirit, the anarch, the despot, the 
myriad-handed destroyer of nations. That genius is the 
Church, — the grand Church of the Catacombs, the glo- 
rious old Church of the Middle Ages, the great civilizer 
— the Church of all time, the true Church of God. 

A glance at her past action is sufficient to prove her 
present power; for born of God, like God, she is un- 
changeable. In all time, her triumph is the triumph of 
the soul ; her power, the hope of progressive and perma- 
nent civilization. 

Thirteen hundred years ago, the North poured upon 
Central and Southern Europe its horded stores of barba- 
rism. From savage Sarmatia, the Vandal and Alan and 
Sueve, came like an Eastern whirlwind, under the savage 
leadership of Genseric. Alaric brought his ruthless 
Gothic hordes from the borders of the Baltic. From the 
bleak regions of Scythia, Attila, a name of terror, appeared 
at the head of his relentless Huns. Germany and Scan- 
dinavia sent forth the wild Burgundian and Visigoth, the 
Norman and the Lombard. The fields of France and the 



94 The Danger of the Age, 

vineyards of Spain weieawaste; the cities of Italy in 
ashes. On the Alps and Appenines and Pyrenees the 
rude banner of the woods replaced the Roman Eagle. 
The spirit of the barbarian was typified in this one word 
of Attila, " I am the scourge of God, — the hammer of the 
earth ; where my horse treads, grass never grows." The 
spirit of the barbarian was fierce cruelty, the absolute 
dominion of materialism over the savage nation of the 
forest. 

From out the mingled mass of vice, ignorance, thirst of 
blood and plunder, the spiritualizing genius of the Church 
formed the glorious civilization, and all the boasted pro- 
gress of Modern nations. She breathed upon the chaos, 
and a new world sprang forth from its bosom. The 
barbarian had brought the sword that murders for the joy 
of slaughter, the torch that burns for the glory of the 
conflagration. Hatred of arts — the anarchy of the forest 
— was all his dower. The Church came to him with the 
olive branch of peace, wreathed around his brow the laurel 
of art and science, breathed into his soul, with the spirit 
of her faith ; the glorious spirit of Christian civilization. 

Free herself, born of God's own freedom, the Church 
made the barbarian free — free with her own godlike free- 



The Danger of the Age. 95 

doin. To lier, — to her alone, — belongs all the high honor 
of our boasted liberties. For the first time in the history 
of idolatrous Europe, she placed liberty upon its true 
basis. She said " obey God, and obey man only for 
God's sake ; all other obedience degenerates into slavery." 
The spirit which made Thermopylae immortal, and con- 
secrated the soil of Marathon and Plataea, fades before 
the freedom which she gave, the God-like freedom won 
on Golgotha, and sealed in the Flavian amphitheatre, and 
on all the fields of Rome, with the blood of twelve mill- 
ions of her own free martyrs. Greeks and Romans, in 
their best days, were slaves, trebly slaves, bound heart 
and hand, to their gods, to their States, to their own 
hearts ; fettered with a threefold chain, not the less in- 
glorious because the bondman hugged the gilded fetters 
as the emblem of his glory. Upon the brow of the barba- 
rian the Church placed the triple halo of civil, moral, and 
religious liberty. Religious liberty : She made the sons 
of the forest martyrs like those who fell in the Coliseum, 
and wrote with their own blood their charter of immortal 
religious freedom. Moral freedom : She sent forth the 
sons of the barbarian as new Apostles, to plant on every 
mountain-top the glorious sign of man's moral regenera- 



96 The Danger of the Age. 

tion. Civil freedom : in her hands the nations felt that the 
liberties she had given them were safe. Despots quailed 
before her. Her spirit nerved the arm of the Christian 
Visigoth in his eight hundred years of struggle against 
the Moor. The spirit of her freedom arrested the cres- 
cent in its despotic march. 

When that new barbarism, Mahometanism, issued from 
the desert of Arabia, with torch and scimitar, to mantle 
Europe in the ten-fold darkness of its sensualism, she 
called on the converted son of the Hun and Vandal, of 
the Frank and Norman, to gird on the sword, hold back 
the despot, and save the new civilization her own genius 
had created. The new war-cry, the Crusaders' shout of 
battle, " God wills it," " God wills it," spreading from 
Clermont, borne along the castled crags of the Rhine, 
caught up by every echo in the Alps and Pyrenees and 
Appenines, reverberating along the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean and Atlantic, thundering along the waters of the 
Baltic and the North sea, led forth the sons of the barba- 
rian to the grandest battles ever fought for human free- 
dom. 

Degenerate sons of glorious sires, unworthy inheritors 
of the brilliant civilization bequeathed by the sons of the 



The Danger of the Age. 97 

cross, the men of our day turn, in their grovelling base- 
ness, upon their champions, and tell us in every form of 
print and speech, tell us, in the name of their own degra- 
ded materialistic spirit, that the Crusades, — shame of 
shames! — were the very madness of religious fanaticism. 
Madness, fanaticism, indeed ! It was the madness which 
redeemed us from Moslem Slavery. It was the fanati- 
cism, which, raising over all Europe, the glorious battle 
shout of " God wills it," " God wills it," and placing the 
invincible cross upon the mailed armor of our forefathers, 
hurled back the sensual march of Moslem degradation. 
Fanaticism indeed ! Why was civilized Europe saved ? 
Because Eome was there — because the grand old faith of 
Rome still held undivided sway over the nations, which 
have since presumed to spurn the mother, who gave them 
the very life of all their boasted institutions. Wherever 
Rome had been rejected in the days of the Crusades, the 
crescent, to this hour, usurps the place of the redeeming 
cross. From the borders of the Danube to the banks of 
the Indus — on the classic banks of the Achelous, on the 
wrecks of Egypt and Assyria and Ionia, over all the lands 
of ancient culture, the Kiosk and Minaret still stand amid 

ruins, as emblems of effeminacy and barbarism. If we 

7 



98 The Danger or the Age. 

are civilized to-day, if we are free, it is owing to the cross 
upon the brazen armour of our sires, to the bannered 
cross, to the sacred battle-shout of the Crusader, to the 
Christian " God wills it," which reverberated in answer 
to the Moslem shout of u Allah Acbar," from the walls of 
Salem to the walls of Vienna, from the waters of the Nile 
to the waters of Lepanto. 

Then, too, among the sons of the barbarous Northern 
forest, rose that other lofty spirit, Christian Chivalry, 
not the maudlin counterfeit chivalry of the modern ro- 
mance, not the skulking mimicry gathered in cowardly 
midnight council, but the very condemnation of all the 
low conceptions of materialism, the generous pure spirit 
of those famous Knights, who, under their steel corselets, 
bore the soul of high honor, refined courtesy, manly 
munificence, which have given its exalted meaning to the 
name of Christian chivalry. Then faith bowed with the 
reverence of religion to human dignity, degraded by Gen- 
tilism ; then the prowess of the brave was the shield of 
the weak ; mercy softened the native roughness of battle ; 
truth sincerely pledged her Knightly word, whose breach, 
in those hearts nurtured in Christian loyalty, was a dis- 
grace from which no valor on tented field or castled steep 



The Danger of the Age. 99 

would redeem the culprit. Created by the spiritualizing 
genius of the Church, formed by her own hands out of 
the relentless natures which the forest had poured upon 
her, growing under her inspiration, the spirit of glorious 
old Catholic chivalry forms the very ideal of exalted 
manhood. 

That ideal, like all her ideals of greatness, the Church 
embodied in an institution which copied her own per- 
petuity. On the borders of European civilization, to 
guard its approaches against the ruffian Moslem, she 
placed a guard, in the dress of a religious warrior the 
noblest of the sons of the Norman, Frank and Visigoth, 
the Knight of St. John, the grand impersonation of 
unconquerable chivalry. Faithful to his deputed trust 
for five centuries, the religious Knight stood sentinel 
under the walls of Jerusalem, on the shores of Rhodes, 
in the rocky fortress of Lavalette, of Malta. In peace, 
the generous hospitaler, the open handed friend of the 
pilgrim and the stranger, the tender nurse of the sick ; 
in war, the noble Knight of Malta stood a living bul- 
wark against which broke, wave on wave, each furious 
shock of the Janizary until the last of the glorious cru- 
saders, Pope St. Pius V., Don Juan of Austria, and their 



100 The Danger of the Age. 

valiant fleet of generous soldiers of the cross, shattered 
forever the Moslem power on the memorable waters of 
Lepanto. 

Ere the age of the Crusaders was passed, the Church 
had taught the Lombard, and Norman, and Frank, and 
Saxon, and Goth — those who had come with torch and 
axe in hand, levelling monument and temple, school 
and library in indiscriminate destruction — to build the 
lofty Gothic arch, to stain its windows with pictured 
crimson, green, and gold, to adorn its niches and pin- 
nacles with statuary of Grecian mould and Christian 
purity ; to embody the ideal of Christian sublimity in 
the massive marble walls of such Cathedrals as that of 
Milan, soaring with its crown of four thousand statues 
of breathing marble, a glorious symbol of her conquest 
over the rude barbarian of the Gothic forest ; to trans- 
form Grecian art in the Cathedral of St. Peter's, lifting 
its stupendous dome upon its huge columns five hun- 
dred feet above the lingering remnants of ancient 
Roman grandeur, and carrying, in the " harmonious 
vastness " of its proportions, the embodied triumph of 
her conquest over the materialism of pagan gods. She 
taught them to open the learned halls of the universi- 



The Danger op the Age. 101 

ties of Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Prague, Salamanca ; 
and gather within their precincts from ten to thirty 
thousand scholars, a living garland woven by her own 
hands, as another token of the fulness of her triumph. 
She made the sons of the barbarian, theologians and 
philosophers like Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas 
Aquinas, mighty names whose equals our progressive 
age has not produced, whose peers the world may 
never behold again, unless they spring from the fer- 
tilizing genius of the Catholic Church. She taught 
them to attune the lyre of Homer to Christian themes, 
to awaken more than the burning eloquence of Cicero 
and Demosthenes in the cause of human liberty and 
sanctity. Her spirit led Columbus across the deep, to 
open new worlds to the civilization of the cross. It 
created the press, the boasted powers of the press, the 
weapon which the materialistic spirit of the age inces- 
santly wields to assail her, and which her own hand 
blessed and still blesses as the great instrument of hu- 
man progress. Her spirit is the hope of modern civi- 
lization. Whatever her enemies may say, the great 
glory of the past is hers. The nations she civilized may 
have learned to scorn her ; her own children may re- 



102 The Danger of the Age. 

vive the sjDirit of pagan persecution ; — despising the 
grand old Church, whose labors conquered and softened 
and humanized the soul of the barbarian, the age may 
call the period of her conquest the Dark Ages. Deem- 
ing, or affecting to believe, her spirit hostile to light 
and liberty and progress, and to unite all that is des- 
potic and debased in the past, and the present, and the 
future, it may name her Babylon, AjDollyon, and An- 
tichrist. But her history is written on all the monu- 
ments of modern civilzation. Truth raises her voice 
from field, and vale, and mountain, and city, cultivated, 
civilized, adorned by her eighteen hundred years of 
thankless labor. To her, to her alone, we owe the un- 
numbered Christian glories by which our civilization 
overshadows all the splendors of Gentile culture ; to her, 
the ten thousand asylums with which she has crowned 
the globe as with a diadem of charity ; to her, the 
strong heart that redeems the captive with its own 
liberty ; the angel's wing that shields the couch of the 
orphan boy; the voice that gladdens the dark approaches 
of the great destroyer ; the light that illumes the por- 
tals of eternity; the virtues which bloom for heaven. 
Her march through time, like the footsteps of her foun- 



The Danger of the Age. 103 

der, is marked by the blessings she has showered upon 
the nations. 

The Church to-day may rise in her old majesty, and 
in the person of Pius IX., the glorious successor of her 
long line of Pontiffs, wave her hand over all the glories 
of your progress and boldly say, " These are the fruits 
of my devotion." These are the deeds done by the 
sons of those children of the forest, redeemed and civi- 
lized and led by my own hand to the era of glorious 
progress. The spirit which has made them great is 
but the breath of my own spirit ; their light but a spark 
of the torch which my hand enkindled in the darkness 
of their sires. 

The Church is the hope of the future. Should Mate- 
rialism triumph, in some future generation ; should in- 
fidelity, barbarism, socialistic anarchy, ever rise on the 
ruins of the civilization she created ; should modern 
societies fall as fell the ancient, — the Church alone, 
amid the wreck, would uphold the banner honored by 
two thousand years of progress. Amid the ruins of 
freedom, she would protest for liberty, and sternly, as 
of old, in the face of the tyrant, refuse to bow the knee 
to Belial or Moloch. She might bleed, but surrender 



104 The Danger of the Age. 

— never, never ! Should faith expire amid the orgies 
of sensualism, the Church, mourning over the descen- 
dants of her early martyrs, over the fallen children of 
those who hallowed her early history by their virgin 
purity, lingering, while hope remained, around the 
ruins of cities which grew to might and brilliancy under 
her gaze, sorrowing over the wreck of nations which 
she had nurtured to greatness — praying still, like Him 
who sent her, for each ungrateful soil that rejects her, 
— mourning, she would turn her steps to other lands 
less unworthy of her blessings. The sun of faith, accom- 
panying her footsteps, leaving the old lands of civiliza- 
tion to moulder in the thickening darkness of barbarism, 
would rise in the freshness of a new morn on the isles of 
the Pacific; or returning to the lands which saluted its 
earliest dawn, shine once more in the fulness of its mid- 
day splendor on those desolate Asiatic shores, where the 
Apostle's voice first spoke peace and brought civilization 
to the degenerate Gentile. From her new home, from 
the new civilization created by her spirit the Church 
would send back new Apostles to the darkened lands that 
scorned her, and bid them bring, with the fires of faith, 
the lost light of art and science, replant the fallen tree of 



The Danger of the Age. 105 

freedom, and water it at need with their hearts' best blood. 

The Church is the only hope of the present. Alone 
blest and consecrated on the heights of Olivet to vivify 
all that is grand and ennobling in the human soul, to 
communicate her own purity to all that is winning or sub- 
lime in art or science, blessing with heaven's blessing, 
from her own full heart, all the marvels of material pro- 
gress, the Church, the ever living genius of Christianity, 
will check, and, let us hope, conquer the Danger of the 
Age. 

The last hope of our civilization is in the immortal 
mission she has received from on high. Sprung from 
God's own being, the connecting link between earth and 
heaven, the sole inheritor of undying promises, she as- 
serts with more than human authority, the great law 
which lies at the root of all true civilization — the su- 
premacy of mind over matter. Gifted with powers equal 
to her mission, while she illumines the mind, she imparts, 
to the will the generosity which can despise the earth ; 
the heroism which renders nations invincible ; the virtues 
which form the true glory of all human civilization. Im- 
mortal with the immortality of Him, whose being is the 
soul of her own existence, she communicates her immor- 



106 The Danger of the Age. 

tality to the nations which listen to her voice, and makes 
them share in the divinity of her own existence. All else 

decays. Cities crumble, the ruins of dynasties and em- 
pires are heaped around her in her march through time. 
The* mighty rush of error dies at her feet, the power of 
the persecutor is bowed before her. When the tyrant is 
gone to the dust, and the loud voices which predicted her 
downfall are hushed and forgotten, she lives to teach and 
redeem the nations ; — she lives, and will live, leaning on 
Almighty power. She will go through the nations and 
the ages till eternity shall strike the passing knell of all 
human things. Because she is thus invincible, because 
she is thus alone the most perfect of all earthly images of 
God's immensity, eternity, and power, while her voice re- 
mains to condemn error, and her power to redeem men 
from the thraldrom of matter, nations may rise again to 
the glory from which they fell. Whatever our age may 
deem, should modern society survive the ruin which threat- 
ens it, other times will look back to her labors in the ages 
which are opening, as we look back to her works in the 
past, and attribute the brightest splendor of their civiliza- 
tion to her devotion. May that hour of triumph come ! 
May the materialistic spirit thus be conquered ! May the 



The Danger of the Age. 107 

influence which is gathering around her the purest and 
noblest of the earth, be widened till the nations which 
have left her, return to her bosom ! May the myriads of 
pure hearts that crowd around her altars, swell till their 
numbers expand into countless millions ! May the light 
of unselfish zeal and heroic devotion, enkindled by her, 
still shining bright and spotless through the thickening 
darkness of materialism, spread till the world is enkindled 
by its flames. The hour of her triumph is the hour 
when shall cease the Danger of the Age. 



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